BX 9833 
.A43 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

:eX^33 — 

Chap. Copyright No. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



SEQUEL 



TO 



"OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT" 



SEQUEL 



TO 



a 



Our Liberal Movement" 



BY 



JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN 

LATE LECTURER ON ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 






t\ 



BOSTON 

ROBERTS BROTHERS 

1897 



^ )\V> 



Copyright, 1897, 
By Joseph Henry Allen. 



ITHB LIB**** 1 



Hnttattg Press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. The Old School and its Work .... 1 

II. German Influence . . . ; 22 

III. Forty Years Later 44 

IV. Frederic Henry Hedge 63 

V. Some Younger Memories 97 

James Freeman Clarke 98 

William Greenleaf Eliot 100 

Thomas Starr King 103 

John Weiss 108 

Frederick Newman Knapp ...... 115 

Thomas Hill 120 

William Francis Allen . 132 

Samuel Longfellow . 137 

Edmund Burke Willson 140 

Octavius Brooks Frothingham 146 

David Atkins Wasson 152 



SEQUEL TO 
OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT." 



I. 

THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOEK. 1 

ONE year ago William Henry Furness, then in 
his ninety-fourth year, — the widest known, 
the most venerated, and the best beloved name 
among us, — was appointed the speaker of this occa- 
sion. It was an act of confiding trust in his per- 
petual youth ; for of him that may be said more 
literally than of any other whom we have known, 
which Homer says of Nestor, that " from his tongue 
flowed speech more sweet than honey, yet already 
two generations of mortal men were passed away, 
while he stood as a prince among the third." And, 
when some of us heard him at the conference in 
Washington, four months later, we listened to a 
voice as resonant and firm, if not quite so mellow, as 
when he spoke to us in his earlier prime. 

It is, as you will easily understand, with much 
diffidence 1 and reluctantly that I have consented to 
occupy the hour which that voice should have filled ; 

1 An address before the Alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, 
June 23, 1896. 

1 1 



A THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

and I did not promise to undertake the task until it 
proved impossible to be undertaken by some one at 
once more nearly contemporary with Dr. Furness 
and more closely associated with his earlier life- 
work. Besides, it was thought fitting that this 
should be an occasion not only or chiefly of personal 
commemoration, but for bringing into a single view 
the work of an entire period, which the passing 
away of that one life seems suddenly to have thrown 
back in the perspective, and to have made a scene in 
history by itself. 

Two circumstances, which I will not dwell on, set 
this view of our topic in special relief to-day, — the 
recent passing away of so many of the " Old Guard " 
among our ministers, making a death-list in the last 
eighteen months of ten, whose average age was con- 
siderably over eighty, and the average length of 
their ordained service nearly sixty years ; 1 and, sec- 
ond, the completion of seventy years since the build- 
ing and consecration of this Divinity Hall in which 
we are now met. And I may add that the reason of 
my speaking is that what I shall offer is in the way 
of personal testimony rather than an historical sur- 
vey simply or a general essay, since every name I 
shall have to recall in these memories is that of one 
toward whom I have stood in some direct personal 

1 Their names in the order of seniority are : Thomas T. Stone 
(1801-95); W. H. Furness (1802-96); J. H. Morison (1S08-96) ; 
H. A. Miles (1809-95) ; G. W. Briggs (1810-95) ; F. W. Holland 
(1811-95) ; E. B. Willson (1820-95) ; J. F. Moors (1821-95) ; O. B. 
Frothingham (1822-95); Augustus Woodbury (1825-95). Dr. 
Stone had been associated with our body since 1846. The otbers 
were all members of the Harvard Divinity School. 



ANDREWS NORTON". 3 

relation of respect, gratitude, affection, kindred, or 
mutual help. 

The history of this School properly begins with 
the time when a regular post-graduate course of the- 
ology was established here under the presidency of 
Dr. Kirkland. The class of 1811, I believe, was the 
first to which this course was open. But the Divin- 
ity School apart from the College was not formally 
organized till 1819, with the appointment of An- 
drews Norton as Professor of Sacred Literature. It 
will be proper, therefore, to begin our survey by 
considering briefly what that first appointment sig- 
nified in the teachings and character of the School. 

The date here given was, as you may remember, just 
twenty years before Professor Norton led the way in 
vehement protest against the newer liberalism her- 
alded in Emerson's Divinity School address, which 
he denounced as " the latest form of infidelity." 
Here it is difficult for us of a younger generation 
to do justice to his position, or perhaps even to 
understand it. It is one of the tragedies of the in- 
tellectual life when a sincere and able leader of 
opinion finds his maturest work already outgrown 
before it has reached its final shape by the advance 
of general thought, and outlives, as Mr. Norton did 
for fifteen years, his own cordial sympathy with 
that advance. Till he gave up his professorship in 
1830, his was unquestionably the dominating mind 
in this school, which was largely guided by his in- 
fluence till the new tide of opinion had well set in. 
Even then his sharpest opponents spoke — Theodore 
Parker, for example, spoke to me — with a singular 



4 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 

deference of his unchallenged scholarship and rare 
mental ability. We are apt to think of him as 
merely a defender of Unitarian opinion on its nega- 
tive side, in " a statement of reasons for not believ- 
ing " certain articles of the popular creed, or else as 
holding an advocate's brief for " the genuineness of 
the Gospels," which he maintained, with laborious 
erudition, in an argument whose sense has grown 
obsolete and even unintelligible in the light of later 
criticism, — nay, was already clearly seen by many 
to be so before the argument appeared in a printed 
book. I remember a conversation with him in 
1850, in which this topic (it is true) was not 
touched upon, but which left on my mind the im- 
pression of a certain intellectual loneliness, if not 
despondency, which one grieves to find in a spirit 
so brave, clear, and widely accomplished as his. He 
was then sixty-four years old. But we should 
think rather of the work he did at twenty-six : the 
strenuous and tonic quality he gave then to the 
earlier liberalism in the " General Eepository ; " his 
great service as the pioneer of a wider literature 
and a higher criticism among us in the " Select 
Journal" conducted by him and that accomplished 
scholar, his friend, Charles Folsom ; the welcome he 
gave to some of the purest and tenderest voices of 
the modern muse ; and the share he has contributed, 
as a true religious poet, to our own treasuries of 
devotion, in a few hymns that are among the very 
finest of their class. And we should remember, 
too, the filial respect and gratitude with which his 
pupils in theology owned their debt to his grave and 



ANDREWS NORTON. 5 

scrupulous criticism, while they might seem — as 
Dr. Furness did — to be giving it a turn that would 
cost him many a pang. Surely, it was no ill augury 
for the work of this School that for eleven of its 
first years this veteran scholar and critic guided its 
teachings by his master mind. 

Though devoted from his youth to the study of 
theology and the service of the higher intellectual 
life, and though himself a man of strong religious 
conviction, Mr. Norton was the only professor in 
this school, down to the appointment of Ezra Abbot, 
who had not actually occupied a pulpit. Possibly, 
this may have been from distaste of natural tem- 
perament, or reluctance to sacrifice that "quiet and 
still air of delightful studies " in which his lot was 
cast. It was, at any rate, a mark of his sensitive 
independence, perhaps of a certain proud humility, 
that he always refused the academic title which is 
conventionally held proper for a theological pro- 
fessor : he was never "Doctor" or "Keverend," to 
the end of his days. These titles he held the due 
only of ordained workers in the ministry. A keen 
critic he always was, as we have heard, of the pulpit 
exercises of other men, younger men, his pupils 
here; and if they were sometimes more daunted 
than helped, as I fear they were, by the severe 
standard he judged them by, no doubt they would 
feel the value of it afterward. It was a man of his 
own training, we must remember, George Eipley, 
who stood out against him boldest and longest on a 
question touching the foundations of religious belief ; 
and, whatever else his students learned or failed to 



6 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

learn, I am sure he taught them respect for perfect 
integrity and honest candor of the spoken word. 

The next influence comparable with Professor Nor- 
ton's in amount and depth for its effect on the life 
nurtured here was, I suppose, that of Henry Ware, 
Junior, a man of radically different mental temper, 
but absolutely harmonious in conviction and aim. 
More than any other, I should say, he was during 
his twelve years' service the pastor and apostle in 
his calling, — in a very special sense, what Matthew 
Arnold so finely says of Emerson, " the friend and 
aider of those who would live in the spirit." He was 
put and sustained in the place of service for which 
he was felt to be singularly fit, by the special con- 
tributions of friends who created that place ex- 
pressly for him. He was a modest but excellent 
scholar, a man of very precious and tender pastoral 
experience, of poetic gift, also, who would (his 
brother said of him) have desired more than any- 
thing the vocation of a poet, shy of native tempera- 
ment, and often slow of utterance, yet capable of 
fervent, ready, direct, and incisive speech, of sym- 
pathies warm, wide, quick, generous, and helpful, 
and, as much as any man we have ever had among 
us, having what we may call the very genius of 
piety, — a choice gift which he shared with a few 
such men as Channing, Furness, Gannett, Dr. Hos- 
mer, and Ephraim Peabody. It is impossible not 
to associate with his influence one very noble phase 
of the life that has gone forth from this School : I 
mean a certain devoted and heroic consecration to 
a ministry of holiness, which I might illustrate by 



HENEY WARE, JUNIOR. 7 

many examples, but will here mention only two, — 
our own " Apostle Eliot " of St. Louis, and that 
beloved and valiant " saint of all the humanities," 
Samuel Joseph May, — men alike in their clear 
insight and great moral courage, though ever so 
wide apart in the lines of service they were sever- 
ally true to. This quality in its teaching we asso- 
ciate as distinctly with the name of Ware as we 
connect its order of intellectual service with those 
of Norton, Palfrey, and Noyes. I wish there were 
time to speak fitly of them all. But here I must 
deal with currents of influence, not with names 
of men ; and there will be some now present who, 
with a certain filial gratitude, will always associate 
the particular influence I speak of with him who 
is recalled oftener than any other I can remember 
by an epithet unusual among us, and very precise 
in its application, as "the sainted Ware." 

His name reminds us, again, that this has never, 
as its proper title, been called a school of Theology, 
but a school of Divinity. It may be well, just here, 
to say a word of what this designation seems to 
imply. I will do it by dwelling a moment on an 
aspect of this School, or of the life sheltered and 
trained in it, which we see perhaps most distinctly 
when we look back to those years among the 
" thirties," or a little earlier, and recall the men 
whose life-work was inspired and shaped here then, 
who make our best illustration of the characteristic 
thing here done. Kepresentative names are those 
of Ephraim and Andrew Peabody, George Ripley, 
Samuel Atkins Eliot, James Freeman Clarke, Wil- 



8 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

liam Henry Charming, Henry Whitney Bellows, and 
Theodore Parker. I choose these from a long list, 
not merely for their eminence, but for the variety 
of gifts they showed. Certainly it would not be 
easy to devise any one type or descriptive name 
that would fairly include them all. But they seem 
to me to illustrate very well a feature in this School, 
which may possibly distinguish it favorably among 
some other schools more famous and more richly 
endowed. The complaint always made of it in its 
earlier years, was its poverty of endowment. Two 
men, it was said by way of reproach, were made to 
do the work of five or six : the first thing wanted, 
we were incessantly told, was a wealthier endow- 
ment. But to such complaint I should always 
reply that we must not " think that the gift of God 
can be purchased with money." The essentials of 
the higher education are a consecrated will, intel- 
lectual opportunity, a wide, buoyant, and elastic 
atmosphere of thought, sufficient guidance — but 
not too much — in the wide wilderness of learning, 
and, above all, great mental leisure and freedom, 
with great joy and wealth of spiritual companionship. 
And it may be fairly questioned whether all these 
may not be had at their best in the inverse ratio 
of that elaborated equipment which is often more a 
burden than a help to the nobler intellectual life. 
Even if we suppose poverty in such things to have 
its difficulties, yet it is through difficulties, not fa- 
cilities, that men win the temper fittest for their 
work in life. 

But I am not speaking here of difficulties, — here, 



A SCHOOL OF DIVINITY. 9 

where university life is overburdened with its wealth 
of opportunity. I speak only of the two essential 
things, — large freedom of choice and large leisure 
of companionship, — these, with the motive and the 
guidance that are just enough for the best uses of 
that freedom and that leisure. It has never seemed 
to me that we suffered any serious loss in that our 
teachers were only two, when those two were Henry 
Ware and Dr. Noyes. I am not speaking here of 
the theological department in a university, — which 
needs (no doubt) a wide variety of special learning, 
— but of a Divinity School such as this was sixty 
years ago, where the first need is personal influence 
and inspiration, restrained but not dominated by 
critical erudition. And I am not saying that this is 
a better thing than the other, but only that it was 
a good thing in its way to have, while we were 
waiting for the other. 

Nay, for the time we have in view it may even be 
contended that it was better than the other would 
have been if we could have had the other then. 
The liberal movement, which in a way it has been 
the business of this School to guide and help, is a 
movement even less of thought than it is of life, a 
movement even less of theology than of practical 
conduct. And at that time its aim and method 
were far less precise than now. The questions that 
were coming up had more to do with the vague 
idealism which we term " Transcendental" than they 
had with the very precise and tangible scientific 
problems of the present day. Nobody knew, for one 
thing, or could possibly suspect, how far the advance 



10 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

of criticism would affect our interpretation of the 
Bible, or how far the advance of natural science 
would invade and alter our very conception of 
human duty and destiny. At such a time, with an 
astounding amount of shallow and restless radicalism, 
with appalling questions of society and politics loom- 
ing, too, in the horizon, it was of far more account 
to the student that his mental atmosphere should be 
elastic and wide than that his mental training should 
be carried on within rigid lines. At such a time 
there is an inconvenience in being committed to too 
sharply defined opinions. Opinion, to be worth 
anything, must be long held in solution in a medium 
(so far as may be) transparent and colorless, and 
must crystallize very slowly about some nucleus of 
positive conviction, which is the gift not of logic, but 
of life. No opinion that was ever held, I should 
think, was more sincerely held, more wholesome, 
more manly, conducive whether to a purer piety or 
a more devoted humanity than the form of super- 
naturalism in which Norton and Ware and their 
whole generation were trained ; yet in the next gen- 
eration it was destined to be completely outgrown, 
while they, as honest men as ever lived, could never 
learn or endure to see it so. That was in one way 
a great pity, causing as it did painful misunderstand- 
ings and great loss of moral force. But it would 
have been a far greater pity if, in the temper of that 
day, there had been here an equipment of learning 
that should compact that half-way view into a full- 
grown system and an intellectual creed. 

From that worse evil, it may be, the very poverty 



ITS METHODS OF STUDY. 11 

of this School protected us. At least, there was not 
a corps of teachers numerous enough, or well enough 
armed with modern appliances of learning, to tie us 
down by exactions of routine-work to the mastery of 
an elaborated method in theology, which we should 
see now to be painfully inadequate. I think that, 
on the whole, a healthier growth has come of it than 
if there had been. I do not easily associate such 
wealth, vigor, variety, and independence in the re- 
ligious life as we recall in the names I recited a 
little while ago, — take only what is signified to us 
in the last two, Bellows and Parker, names that 
belong to the period next before my own, — with 
the stricter training appropriate to a purely scientific 
theology that is up to the present standard. That 
would mean a longer time of pupilage than is good 
for the average man, — at any rate, longer than 
would have been possible to us then. I give my 
testimony for what it is worth ; but I know that, 
for one, the best piece of work I did while here was 
entirely outside all school courses, actual or conceiv- 
able : it was an attempt to master the principles of 
the modern scientific method, with such guidance as 
could be had then, in the seven thick volumes of 
Whewell and John Stuart Mill, aided by some light 
in pure mathematics from my near friend of those 
days, Thomas Hill, and brightened by a good deal 
of talk with President Walker, who was so generous 
of his shrewd, wise, kindly, and helpful companion- 
ship to us younger men. This may serve as, if not 
a brilliant yet a useful example of what I suppose 
was very common, — the accidental and incidental 



12 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 

benefit that befell from the less formal methods of a 
Divinity School in that earlier day. 

I will now attempt to recall one or two aspects 
of the field where onr life-work lay, for which we 
had been preparing under such influences as I have 
described. The date I have here in mind is 1840, 
which marks the end of the period spoken of hith- 
erto and the beginning of that in which I became 
a sharer in its tasks. Our life-work was to be 
found in that part of the Lord's vineyard for which 
we were in training, to dress it and to keep it, every 
man according to his several ability. 

The soil of that vineyard was just then remarka- 
bly fertile in " isms," which grew in it like weeds. 
These I would define as so many off-hand creeds, 
of one article aniece, which the believer in it ac- 
cepted with a certain romantic faith, and spent 
his life in thrusting upon the consciences of his 
fellow-men. All these more or less abortive creeds 
had, I think, an aim more mundane than the curi- 
ous other-worldliness which has come into being 
since the famous " Chardon Street Conference," 
where they swarmed preparatory to taking flight, 
— where I witnessed a great twinkling and sputter- 
ing of new lights, some of them set rather awk- 
wardly in their candlesticks, and not nearly so 
neatly trimmed as hotly burning. This took place, 
we must remember, while Brook Farm was an 
enterprise just set on foot, and five years before 
the first advent of modern spiritism. Some of 
those embryo schemes were of a certain vague but 
high idealism, and were the precursors of the 



FORMS OF RADICALISM. 13 

Theosophy and Christian Science of our day. Some 
met the social problems of the time in a generous, 
devoted, and heroic temper, testified in brave cam- 
paigns of conscience, such as Christian socialism, 
the temperance reform, and (most chivalrous of 
all) the " old-school " antislavery crusade. Some 
were not much more than the whim of a few 
eccentrics, — the no-Sabbath, no-property, no-gov- 
ernment, no-resistance leaguers. But, in general, 
they were " sports," or offshoots, of that growth of 
modern liberalism, suddenly become conscious of 
itself, and without the experience of that twofold 
discipline which has so sternly held them in check 
during the half -century which has elapsed since, — 
the discipline of fact, painfully learned through 
the struggle that came to a crisis in our Civil War, 
with that rather chaotic chapter which describes 
our political performance since ; the discipline of 
science, — for the time I speak of was twenty 
years before Darwin had brought home to the 
common mind the fact of evolution in natural 
things, or Spencer had expounded the general law 
which has greatly chastened and chilled the revo- 
lutionary temper so vagrant and rampant then. 

And, it must be remembered, all these escapades 
of moral knight-errantry took a shape in this com- 
munity, with its Puritan antecedents, at once serious, 
sternly practical, and even, in a sense, intensely 
religious. Each, in its fashion,, set itself about 
taking the kingdom of heaven by violence ; each, 
no doubt sincerely, deemed itself the one indis- 
pensable gateway to the New Jerusalem, the earthly 



14 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

paradise. It may be easily seen, then, what a 
warp must have been given to the minds in train- 
ing for their life-work here. Those minds had 
chosen their vocation because it represented to 
them the ideal side of life. They were for that 
very reason susceptible to this chaotic clamor of 
many tongues, and fascinated by some one or 
another phase of that ethical ideal, which glances 
in facets as multitudinous as a cut and polished 
gem. How would the sober tradition of their re- 
ligious culture be invaded, how would the grave 
lessons of their theological or philosophic training 
be beguiled, by these so many voices from the 
world about, when not one of those voices, as their 
own Scripture itself assured them, was without 
its proper signification ? Who knew whether it 
might not be the one voice to show you or me the 
particular path it was ordained for us to follow, 
forsaking every other ? 

In looking through the catalogue of these years, 
we see how large a proportion of those educated 
here have found their real vocation in some other 
thing than what they seemed to have chosen. Life 
is so different from our theories and plans of life ! 
The liberal ministry, as we have sought it or ac- 
cepted it, has been often said to be like certain 
localities, which are good to grow up in, but par- 
ticularly good to emigrate away from. This may 
be a drawback in a profession, or in the education 
that prepares one for a profession ; but it need not 
be a disaster or a reproach. It is a special glory of 
the life educated here that it has turned so easily 



JOHN GORHAM PALFEEY. 15 

to so large a variety of outside work. Among its 
ministers of the Word there have been a fair pro- 
portion better known to the public as teachers, 
historians, artists, or poets ; some as agents of 
public charities, literary editors and critics, or 
correctors of the press ; some few as soldiers val- 
iant in the field, or men of high authority in public 
station. All this was in answer to the demand of 
a restless time, a great national crisis, an immature 
civilization, a fast-growing, ever-hopeful community. 
It was a part of the work this School had to do, — 
a gift to the world not inferior, perhaps, to ever so 
imposing a record of ecclesiastics, scholiasts, and 
devotees. 

How could I better illustrate this feature of its 
history than by the name of that noble friend of 
my earlier studies and my after ministry, — John 
Gorham Palfrey, eight years professor in this 
School? As the successor of Buckminster and 
Everett, he had dignified a pulpit not second in 
lustre to any of that time with laborious and ac- 
complished service. As instructor here, he, among 
other tasks, prepared a text-book of several Oriental 
dialects, and was a pioneer in our first attempts at a 
scientific criticism of the Old Testament. As a mem- 
ber of Congress, later on, he sacrificed popularity 
to honest independence, becoming one of the original 
founders of the Free Soil party. As postmaster 
of Boston, he was a reformer of official methods, 
and set an example, which some would deem 
fantastic, of scrupulous integrity in his accounts. 
Always a laborious student, the well-known classic 



16 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

historian of New England, and able among the 
ablest editors of the " North American Keview," he 
was, as a gentleman, cultivated and courteous, with 
abounding vivacity and wit. As a man of con- 
science, he set the high example of liberating nine- 
teen slaves whom he had selected as his share in a 
family inheritance, and generously aiding them 
afterwards, as if dependent members of his own 
household. Such was the versatile and brilliant 
intellectual life he brought to this high service. By 
so much was the theologian ennobled in the man ! 

I have spoken of Dr. Palfrey as a pioneer among 
us in the scientific criticism of the Old Testament. 
This is better seen in his attempt, published in 
1840, at a constructive theory of the book of 
Genesis, — which he regarded as a compilation 
from earlier sources by the hand of Moses, — than 
in his defence of the Mosaic authority of the Pen- 
tateuch throughout, which is quite on the lines of 
the conventional apologists. These lines were 
broken into, four years later, with a much bolder 
hand, by Mr. Norton in his " Note on the Old 
Testament," which is as radical in 'tone as anything 
we have had since, but for its very characteristic 
reserve touching Moses and Elijah. Dr. Noyes's 
argument on Messianic prophecy, in the " Christian 
Examiner" of 1834, — which brought out the 
famous hint of prosecution under the old Massachu- 
setts law of blasphemy, — we may take to have 
been (however heretical it looked) a piece of legiti- 
mate textual criticism ; and it is not, perhaps, to be 
counted as a conscious departure from the tradi- 



THE LATER CRITICISM. 17 

tional point of view. His eminent service to this 
School by his intellectual candor, honesty, and 
courage, in guiding it through a critical period of 
transition, by which he earned a debt of gratitude 
from his immediate students such as was never 
quite due to any other, belongs to a time consider- 
ably later than that I have here in view. But 
these three, taken together, show how completely 
the later method of thinking that prevails among 
us, both literary and historical, which in the last 
half-century has almost wholly blotted out the 
older view, was an outgrowth of the training 
of this School. Dr. Furness's tender and sympa- 
thetic treatment of the gospel story, which ingenu- 
ously attempts to identify natural and supernatural, 
while keeping close to the letter of the record, 
claims to follow out legitimately the lessons he 
had learned under Norton's teaching, since what 
it holds to have been natural in Jesus would be 
supernatural in anybody else. And it was only 
one easy step in advance when Theodore Parker, 
with temper and motive widely different from 
theirs, threw wide open to public gaze the gateway 
of the course that has been followed since. Emer- 
son's address in this very chapel in 1838, — the 
controversy between Norton and Eipley that fol- 
lowed the next year, — the group of later eloquent 
expounders, including John Weiss, Samuel John- 
son, Octavius Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow, and 
William Potter, not to speak of work done by their 
associates still living, — are so many dates that 
connect every phase of the advancing liberalism in 

2 



18 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 

theology with names, influences, and traditions 
belonging to this School. Not one of them be- 
trays a motive merely academic, speculative, criti- 
cal, or scientific. Every one made a step forward 
into a new and wider intellectual life. No mat- 
ter how frank the negation, it always sought, not 
a narrower or feebler, but a larger and a robuster 
faith. 

In this sketch I have had in view a definite 
period in the history of this School, — a period 
which ended fifty-six years ago, and had most to 
do with shaping out that life whose general fea- 
tures we have been trying to retrace. For this 
reason I have said nothing as yet, and can say 
but a few words now in closing, of two men to 
whom I am personally indebted very much, whose 
best work in life was too closely related with our 
present topic to be quite left out in our survey, — 
Convers Francis and Frederic Henry Hedge. 

Professor Francis was somewhat on in years, not 
far from fifty, at his coming here ; and it may be 
that his most fruitful work in life, his most kind- 
ling influence, and the singular esteem yielded him 
by the men of his own time, belong rather to the 
date of his more than twenty years' ministry in 
Watertown than to the somewhat hampered and 
(I fear) disappointed toils of his later service. His 
earlier manhood fell in with the sudden widening 
of the intellectual field by what was, to all intents 
and purposes, the discovery of a new literature, a 
new philosophy, a new way of thinking among us. 
I do not dare to say whether the enthusiasm that 



CONVEES FRANCIS. 19 

greeted this fresh discovery did or did not exag- 
gerate the great qualities of German letters or 
German thought. For the space of half a gen- 
eration, while the many looked on ignorantly or 
jealously askance, there were a chosen few to whom 
it was almost as if there were no other letters and 
no other thought worth their study. In the heart 
of this select circle, the mind of Dr. Francis re- 
ceived with eager enjoyment and quenchless thirst 
the treasures thus thrown open, though it might 
be in their most arid form. For it was a mind 
more sympathetic than critical, widely and gener- 
ously eclectic, almost too impartial in its likes, and 
apparently having no dislikes at all. As Theodore 
Parker, his grateful younger friend, said to me, he 
" did not gravitate to the stronger thoughts or the 
greater minds." Such width of mental sympathy 
lacks some stringent mental tonic. To one of less 
receptive faculty, his must seem a superfluity of 
mere possession, which dulled the edge of indepen- 
dent thinking, and, like a lens inconveniently near, 
blurred the sharp outline of the object you were 
trying to define. But to one seeking material for 
unbiassed judgment nothing could be finer than 
that quiet impartiality, that untiring kindliness and 
patience, that lavish generosity in putting at your 
service, in any shape you would, the stores he had 
so diligently gathered. No one, I am sure, ever 
served the interest of true learning here with more 
scrupulous devotion ; and the placid widening-out 
of the circle of our knowledge under his kindly 
influence was of more value, in that day of eager 



20 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 

anticipation and hastily formed conclusion, than 
some of us were quite willing to understand. 

Dr. Hedge's large and richly stored intelligence 
had had the advantage of a far more thorough 
early discipline than most of us have received, or 
than could have been given in this country at the 
time he needed it most. In his school-days Ger- 
man became to him a second mother tongue. Thus 
not only did he benefit from the tonic method of the 
German "gymnasium," but he was guarded from 
the illusion which many suffered under, of taking 
all to be sublime, august, and true that came to 
them in the long and many syllables of that magic 
tongue, — since he knew, among other things, Ger- 
man school-boy slang. The great boon he gained 
from that source was, however, qualified in him by 
two specially English gifts — a certain wealth of 
poetic imagination, with a feeling of the rhythmic 
melody of language that might easily have made 
one of less critical or reflective temper eminent as 
orator or poet ; and a deep ground of ethical con- 
viction, which wholly dominated his speculative 
faculty, and made him restive under the restraint 
of any merely intellectual creed. More than any 
other of like philosophic turn whom I have ever 
known, philosophy was to him a department of 
literature, not a system of regulated opinion. More 
than with any other of so wide literary accomplish- 
ment, the chief interest with him lay in the ranges 
of higher contemplation. The more he studied the 
results of speculative science, the less he was satis- 
fied with any claim it put forth to solve that most 



FREDEEIC H. HEDGE. 21 

tantalizing of problems, how to give a true intel- 
lectual theory of the universe. It is likely that 
this sense of inadequacy troubled at intervals his 
philosophic conscience ; for he never quite let that 
problem go, or fully accepted the positivist dogma 
(which he inclined to) that in the nature of things 
it is unsolvable. His refuge was that which many 
of the best minds of every age have found, — re- 
ligious discipline and religious meditation. The 
visible work he did was by no means a full measure 
of his ability ; yet he was one of the most pains- 
taking as well as conscientious of workers, one of 
the widest in intellectual range, and a diligent 
learner to the end of his days. His most charac- 
teristic treatise, "Reason in Religion," was closely 
associated with his earlier labors here ; and it re- 
mains among the most highly valued of the agencies 
that have enriched the thinking faculty in a gen- 
eration later than his own. 

I have thus outlined, so far as my allotted hour 
permits, the work of the Old School as we have 
known it, illustrated by the names and incidents 
most familiar in its history. How that work has 
been developed and carried on in the half -century 
since the period chiefly had in view, and how its 
influence has gone forth upon the mind and life of 
our community, is a topic requiring a larger treat- 
ment and a different hand. I trust that what has 
now been said may serve, in some slight measure, 
as an introduction to such a theme. 



II. 

GEKMAN INFLUENCE. 1 

IN order to bring the vast topic of German The- 
ology in any intelligible way within my limits, 
I must confine myself to the very narrowest inter- 
pretation of the words in which my subject is an- 
nounced. And these must be understood to mean, 
not how Unitarianism is to be found in German 
theology, for it is not there at all — at least in 
name. The German theologians, for reasons which 
I need not explain, are generally bound by Lutheran 
or other State traditions and conditions ; and while 
it may often be said of the best of them that their 
way of thinking is quite in harmony with ours, their 
form of doctrine is wholly different. I shall not, 
therefore, trouble myself or you about that, but 
take what is the only serviceable rendering of the 
words of my title, namely : How, when, and where 
has the course of Unitarianism in America been 
affected by contact with German theology since the 
beginning of that movement of thought among us 
which we term Transcendental ? 

This brings me, again, to a very precise date, 
which I must take for my starting-point. That 
date I shall take, for reasons of convenience, at just 

1 An address delivered in Channing Hall, in November, 1888. 



EMERSON'S ADDRESS. 23 

fifty years ago. And, as there is a personal equa- 
tion in all these things which more or less warps 
our judgment of them, perhaps you will pardon me 
the impropriety of a word to explain what those 
reasons of convenience are. I was at that time a 
student in college, among circumstances that led 
me to take an eager interest in the discussions then 
going on, and to look forward with timid hope to 
the part I might possibly be afterwards called to 
take in them. I was in the dear and serious house- 
hold of my mother's brother Henry Ware, Junior, 
who affectionately encouraged such early hopes in 
his kindly but taciturn way. I had listened with 
a vague but exhilarating delight to Mr. Emerson's 
Divinity School Address, given that summer, — 
which had, as you know, shocked some, while it 
had charmed others, as the first clear word of " an- 
other gospel, which yet w~as not another." So that 
I was already prepared, when a year later the battle 
of the books began, to follow its changing fortunes 
with a degree of personal feeling as to the issues 
involved which has not been in the least diminished 
to this day. In short, to speak with still greater 
precision, the exact crisis that brought to the front 
the bearing of German theology upon American 
opinion was the publication, in 1839, of Professor 
Andrews Norton's Divinity School Address on " The 
Latest Form of Infidelity." 

Here, perhaps, I ought to add a further word of 
explanation. First, as to myself, — for by nurture 
and habit I clung strongly to the more conservative 
side in the debate that followed. I have always 



24 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

considered that Professor Norton had the better of 
his opponents in scholarship and logic ; till the age 
of twenty-five I intended or expected that my place 
would be on that side ; and if I have altered from 
this position since, it has been not so much due (as 
I think) to the course of that discussion as to a 
passage of argument with that rude logician, Orestes 
A. Brownson, during the crisis of the notable change 
by which he became a Catholic. Next, as to others ; 
for the real point at issue in that debate has been 
often misunderstood, as if it had been the question 
of admitting the supernatural or miraculous in 
Christianity. On the contrary, in one of his letters 
addressed to Professor Norton, Mr. George Eipley 
says : " For my own part, I cannot avoid the con- 
clusion that the miracles related in the Gospels 
were actually wrought by Jesus : " and in a pamph- 
let of the same date, understood to have been writ- 
ten by Theodore Parker, he says, " I believe that 
Jesus, like other religious teachers, wrought mira- 
cles." And as neither of these men has been ac- 
cused of Jesuistry or moral cowardice, it appears 
that the question at issue was not as to their 
opinions, which at that time were in the main con- 
ventional and customary, but as to a new and un- 
familiar order of thought, which was seen to be 
powerfully affecting the principles and foundations 
of men's religious belief. What this new order of 
thought was, and what has been its effect among us 
during this past half-century, it will be my duty to 
make as clear as I can within the limits allowed 
me. 



GERMAN THEOLOGY. 25 

That influence, whatever it was, we ascribe in a 
vague and general way to German theology, espe- 
cially from the time of Schleiermacher. But Ger- 
man theology of that period : — that is, of the last 
ninety years — is (as I said) a very vast and un- 
manageable topic ; and I must therefore narrow my 
field still further, by pointing out three great de- 
partments into which it may be roughly divided. 

First is that which especially dates from Schleier- 
macher himself, though it also has to do with those 
famous philosophical schools which appear to have 
had absolute control in the higher thought of Ger- 
many down to about forty years ago, — chiefly, the 
school of Hegel. It was these that gave the great 
intellectual impulse, and that appeared to open up 
an entirely new interpretation of religious thought 
and the religious life ; and hence created that fresh 
enthusiasm among some of our younger men half a 
century or more ago, which we call Transcendental- 
ism, and Professor Norton called " the latest form of 
Infidelity." This (as I just said) did not so much 
affect men's particular opinions as their whole w T ay 
of looking at the subject of Eeligion. We may call 
it, if you please, the German Speculative Theology. 

Second, and producing its effect more gradually, 
is a movement which started still farther back, 
largely from the impulse given by the German poet 
and critic, Lessing. I may describe it in a general 
way by saying that its effect has been to take the 
Bible out of that sanctuary where it was regarded as 
a holy thing by itself, never to be judged, but only 
to be explained and then accepted reveringly by the 



26 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

human mind ; to take it, I say, from that sanctuary, 
to class it among our other literary treasures, and to 
interpret it just as we do other books of history, of 
legend or tradition, of moral exhortation, or of re- 
ligious poetry. I say nothing for or against this 
result, which I suppose that we are all at this day 
fully agreed to accept. I only say that to bring it 
about took something like a century of controversy, 
often very angry and bitter; and that during this 
time there was evolved a mass of erudition, argu- 
ment, exposition, speculation, literally unspeakable 
in its dimensions, which makes the field of German 
Critical Theology. And it is the diligent cultiva- 
tion of this field among our own best scholars — 
including Professor Noyes, Dr. Hedge, Theodore 
Parker, and James Freeman Clarke, against ,the 
strong protest of the elder school represented by 
Professor Norton — that has brought about the 
most marked changes in the body of opinion known 
as American Unitarianism. 

Third, we must reckon a field with which I have 
nothing whatever to do here, although in some ways 
it is perhaps the most important of all. For Ger- 
man theology, in its large sense, has been one of the 
greatest and most remarkable educating influences 
of the last half-century to a very large class of 
minds. Every topic suggested in both the lines 
of discussion I have described has been taken up, 
and with infinite painstaking, erudition, and patience 
followed out to the last slender filament of inference 
or investigation on which it was possible to string 
an opinion or a guess. It would be mere pedantry 



SCHLEIERMACHER. 27 

to cite the names of the innumerable laborers in 
that wide field ; 1 and any attempt to explore it 
would only lead us away from the strict and narrow 
line we have to follow. That portion of the field 
we may call the German Theology of Erudition. 
With it, as I have said, I have for the present 
nothing to do. 

I must now go back, and explain the prominence 
which has been given in my topic to the name of 
Schleiermacher. 

Frederick Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born 
in 1768, and died in 1834, at the age of sixty-six. 
He was a man of the very finest religious genius, 
a preacher of extraordinary fervor and wealth of 
thought, of a moral nature singularly clinging, sym- 
pathetic, and emotional, a scholar of vast erudition 
even for a German, a student of great and indefati- 
gable industry, and a teacher, or intimate adviser, of 
personal weight and influence almost unparalleled. 
Professor Philip Schaff calls him, without qualifica- 
tion, " the greatest divine of the nineteenth century." 
To understand the ground of his unexampled and 
unique influence upon the religious thought of his 
day, we should take into account that very early in 
life he saw clearly these two things : first, that the 
doctrinal system built up during the Eeformation 
had completely gone to seed, and existed only as a 
lifeless and sterile form — at least in Germany and 
among the educated classes, where his work was, as 
we see in the life of Lessing — and must perish 

1 Tholuck and Neander are perhaps those which will be most 
widely and gratefully recognized. 



28 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

unless a new soul could be breathed into it ; and, 
second, that the idea, the method, the discipline, 
embodied in the Christian Church and known to the 
Christian conscience, must form the type, the model, 
the condition, under which such new religious life 
could be had, — and this, if it must be, independent 
of all doctrinal forms whatever. To show the inten- 
sity of his conviction on this point, I copy here his 
own words : " Eeligion was the mother's bosom, in 
whose sacred warmth and darkness my young life 
was nourished and prepared for the world which lay 
before me all unknown ; and she still remained with 
me, ivhen God and immortality vanished before my 
doubting eyes!' This, I say, is his characteristic 
testimony to the reality of the religious life, wholly 
independent of all doctrinal forms whatever. And 
we must take it as our starting-point, in estimating 
both the peculiar nature of his influence upon the 
mind of his time, and the peculiar dread of that 
influence which we find amongst those who, like 
Professor Norton, honestly held that very clearly 
defined opinions were essential to any hold at all 
upon the Christian faith. To such minds that lan- 
guage sounded merely vague, delusive, and 
sophistical. 

The date of the first strong impression made by 
Schleiermacher upon the mind of his time was the 
year 1799, when he published a series of eloquent 
pamphlet " Discourses " on Eeligion, addressed to 
" the cultivated among its despisers." As to this 
date we have to bear in mind that it was just at the 
coming in of the tide of reaction that followed the 



SCHLEIERMACHEE. 29 

extravagant anti-religious fury of the French Kevo- 
lution, and set so strongly towards conservatism in 
politics and religion : so that he was doing in Ger- 
many a like task to that attempted just then by 
Chateaubriand in France. But we must look back 
of that date, to see how this religious reaction took 
just the shape it did in his mind. The father of 
Schleiermacher was a good old-fashioned Calvinistic 
preacher, chaplain to a regiment ; and, for conven- 
ience in some of his wanderings, he put the boy at 
school among the " Moravian Brethren." These 
made the most pious of religious communities. In 
spiritual descent their tradition came down from 
Bohemian exiles, who carried into their retreat the 
same religious ardor that had flamed with such 
obstinate fury in the Hussite wars ; but in them, or 
in their followers, it was tempered to a sweet, some- 
what austere, and most nobly self-sacrificing piety. 
It was the placid faith of a company of Moravian 
missionaries in a storm at sea that had touched John 
Wesley more profoundly than ever before with the 
reality and power of a religious life. And this 
obscure community was " the mother's bosom, warm 
and dark," which nourished the germs of that vounej 
life given to its charge. 

The later experience of university life, and the 
deliberate study of the Deistical writers (then mak- 
ing a good deal of noise), which he undertook against 
his father's earnest protest, did not, as we have seen, 
extinguish the deep sense that religion in the soul 
is the most profound and blessed of realities ; while 
they did convince him that it must be interpreted 



30 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

to the educated mind in a way very different from 
the old doctrinal scheme, — a way in which the 
form of expression should be, avowedly, not the 
adequate statement of a fact of human knowledge, 
but the symbol, or image (Vorstelhcng) of that which 
far transcends all human knowledge. Hence he 
chose such phrases as seemed to minds like Pro- 
fessor Norton's a mere playing fast and loose with 
sacred things, sophistry or conscious self-deception, 
"veil-weaving" : about one's real opinions, so as to 
hide their true meaning from others' eyes. Thus, 
departing from the common language of theology, 
Schleiermacher speaks not of " God the Creator and 
Moral Governor " (which are the terms insisted on 
by Martineau and English thinkers generally), but 
rather of "the Divine Life " and our "communion 
with the Living God : a sharp distinction," he says, 
" is to be drawn between the Living God and a 
personal God ; " not of " a Future Life of Judgment," 
in the terms familiar to most Christians, but rather 
of the " Eternal Life," or deathlessness of the spirit- 
ual principle in man, and of its blending in the 
Hereafter with the Universal Life, in language that 
implied, or seemed to imply, that its conscious 
identity would be lost. 2 In short, his whole system 
of doctrine ( Glaubenslehre) — which is developed at 
great length and very elaborately — appears to be 
built on the interpreting not of any written word, 
but of the actual experience of the religious life. Its 

1 Schleiermacher (as Professor Norton reminds us) is a German 
word signifying " veil-maker." 

2 Compare Martineau's " Study of Religion," ii. 355-360. 



SCHLEIERMACHER. 31 

data are purely the facts of Christian consciousness ; 
and, as a countryman of his has said of him, it was 
" quite uncertain whether Schleiermacher believed 
or not in revelation, miracle, the divinity of Christ, 
the trinity, the personality of God, or the immor- 
tality of the soul. In his theological phrases he 
would avoid all that could distinctly mean this or 
that." In his exposition of faith he starts with this 
one point of fact : / am a Christian ; this I am by 
nature and inheritance. By introspection and analy- 
sis, not by study of the letter of the gospel, he will 
then determine what that fact implies ; what is the 
meaning of incarnation, atonement, resurrection, in 
the terms of religious experience ; and this shall be 
his Christian creed. Of course, all sharp bounds of 
doctrine disappear; and this simplicity of method, 
carried out with the wonderful wealth and fervor 
of his exposition, makes him the great master of 
liberal theology, by whatever name his disciples may 
be called. 

But it is not my business here to expound Schleier- 
macher's method or doctrinal system, however 
briefly : only to show how the order of thought I 
have been trying to describe came into effect on New 
England Unitarianism at that particular time; why 
it fascinated some while it alarmed or offended 
others, and in what ways it has modified the char- 
acter of our religious thinking ever since. 

This order of thought was (as I have already 
hinted) further strengthened by those schools of 
German philosophy so powerful in the first half of 
this century, which came to be eagerly studied 



32 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

among us about fifty years ago. I have nothing 
whatever to do with them here as systems of opinion. 
I only speak of them because they shared the same 
obloquy with the new theology from those who im- 
perfectly understood them ; and because they have 
strongly affected the current of opinion since — more 
strongly than most of us are apt to think. Not 
directly ; for few cared to study them, or could 
possibly understand them if they did. But those 
few have in a very special sense been the teachers 
of our generation, and have influenced even the pop- 
ular way of thinking among us more than we are 
often aware. James Freeman Clarke, for example, 
was strongly attracted by these philosophies and by 
the theology founded upon them. Then there are 
two well-known works of two very accomplished 
students in this direction : " Keason in Eeligion " by 
Dr. Hedge, to whom German came to be almost a 
second mother tongue during his school-days passed 
in Germany, and who had as much to do as anybody 
in naturalizing the new order of thought among us ; 
and " The Science of Thought," by Professor Everett, 
which is understood to be a product of the philoso- 
phy of Hegel, — that philosophy held in especial 
dread and abhorrence by sober thinkers among us 
half a century ago. Just in proportion to the seri- 
ousness and the religiousness of their way of think- 
ing have the men of a younger generation been 
influenced by such books as these. 

But the philosophy I speak of has had another 
effect among us, more direct and more intelligible. 
Fifty years ago, as I have shown, Unitarians were 



OPINION AS TO MIRACLES. 33 

substantially all agreed in accepting Christianity as 
a special and supernatural revelation, in the common 
sense of those terms. I have quoted both George 
Eipley and Theodore Parker, in their controversy 
with Professor Norton, as professing, with the ut- 
most apparent simplicity, their own belief in the 
Christian miracles. At this day, on the contrary, 
not only (with very rare exceptions) those who are 
regarded as leaders of thought among us — such as 
Martineau in England and Hedge in America — 
have quietly dropped or openly discarded the argu- 
ment from miracles ; but Broad Churchmen in 
England, like Bishop Colenso, who never forfeited 
his bishopric, like Bev. Charles Voysey and Stopford 
Brooke (before the secession of these latter), have 
done the same ; Matthew Arnold, openly a member 
of the Church of England, says without rebuke that 
"miracles do not happen." The way for this re- 
markable change of opinion among men in general 
has no doubt been opened by scientific habits of 
thinking ; but, as a change in religious opinion, the 
way for it had to be prepared by philosophy. 
Schleiermacher, as usual, speaks both ways : " In- 
sulate any natural fact," he says, " and it becomes 
a miracle ; repeat any miracle, and it becomes 
a natural fact." And, for a time, the religious 
scruple is pacified by such a compromise. 

Clear and honest thinking, however, demands 
something more than this tampering with words. 
It demands, first, a fixed habit of mind in harmony 
with the best opinion or knowledge of the day : 
this we call a philosophical method in our thought ; 

3 



34 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

and, second, a careful study, with the best helps of 
modern learning, of the documents and evidences of 
our faith : this we call a scientific criticism in our 
theology. I have just spoken of the great change 
that has come to pass in the opinions of the think- 
ing world, in the common understanding of the 
Bible history. I have now a few words to say of 
the way in which this change has been helped 
amongst ourselves by the study of German critical 
theology. 

To go into the subject properly, I ought to show 
how there have grown up , in Germany, more or 
less directly as the fruit of different philosophical 
schools, a great variety of interpretations, or ways 
of interpreting the Bible records, most of them more 
or less rationalistic ; and how these may be divided 
into three main groups : the non-miraculous, pure 
and simple, represented by the name of Paulus ; 
the mythical or poetic, represented by Strauss ; and 
the historical or scientific, of which the best ex- 
ponent is the school of Baur. Now the story of 
these groups is extremely interesting and instruc- 
tive, but I have not time to give it here ; 1 and, 
besides, my subject seems to make it more proper 
for me to illustrate it by examples taken among our 
own students and theologians, instead of those that 
come to us across the water in a foreign tongue. 

Strictly speaking, there has been no scholarly 
investigation of this field amongst ourselves. The 
best that any of our students have done has been 

1 It is given in " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 
vol. iii. pp. 227-238. 



EAELIER INDICATIONS. 35 

to study according to their ability, and appropriate 
as far as they thought good, the learning which has 
been poured forth in unstinted measure from the 
German press. German has for this half-century 
been the favorite, I may say the indispensable, 
language in which to follow up any of these lines 
of investigation. And, whether our own writers 
have borrowed their opinions out and out, or 
whether they have thought them out for them- 
selves under the atmospheric pressure of that great 
world of learning and speculation, the result is 
one : the general, even the popular, way of looking 
at the subject, with or without knowing it, has 
taken its tone from Germany. 

The earliest signs of this influence among us were 
an essay on " The Messianic Prophecies," by Mr. 
(afterwards Professor) George R. Noyes, in 1834; 
critical " Lectures on the Old Testament," by Pro- 
fessor Palfrey, published in 1840; and a "Note on 
the Old Testament," by Professor Norton, in 1844. 
These, however, though expressing the extreme of 
radical opinion in their day, were addressed only to 
scholars, and hardly reached the general mind ; then, 
too, they did not directly touch the Christian records, 
and so excited little or no particular alarm. The first 
book I remember, showing clear traces of German 
influence upon critical opinion, — less by its argu- 
ment than by the fact of its publication, — was a 
tale called " Theodore, or the Skeptic's Conversion," 
translated by James Freeman Clarke from the 
learned and famous theologian De Wette. Theodore 
is an ingenuous young theologian, beginning to be 



36 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

troubled with doubts of the supernatural, — a sort 
of Eobert Elsmere of that period, whose spiritual 
struggles are mild, indeed, compared with those of 
a later day, and who easily finds comfort in such 
pious compromises as those we have seen in 
Schleiermacher. There could not have been a 
gentler or kindlier introduction among us of the 
line of thought which controversy was to make so 
familiar afterwards. De Wette was one of the 
earliest, one of the most devout and pure-minded, 
as well as most copious and learned, of the new 
school of commentators ; and his writings, though 
long left behind by the rushing current of specu- 
lative exegesis, did perhaps more than any others 
to instruct the students of that generation. 

It is natural to speak next of the work of 
Theodore Parker, whose chief task of erudition was 
to translate and expound, from his immense range 
of reading, De Wette's commentary on the Old 
Testament. He had already, in his South Boston 
sermon on " The Transient and Permanent in 
Christianity " (1841), cast these topics of learned 
discussion into the waters of popular controversy ; 
and his name, more than any other, came to be the 
watchword of the change of opinion that was slowly 
coming to pass upon the popular mind : a change 
which was strikingly shown three years ago this 
month, when the American Unitarian Association 
published a large volume of Theodore Parker's 
writings, including that very discourse, under the 
editorship of James Freeman Clarke. 

Two other Unitarian scholars, especially revered 



W. H. FUENESS. — E. H. SEAES. 37 

and beloved among us, have shown in different 
ways and more obscurely something of the German 
influence in their commentaries upon the Gospel, — 
Dr. William Henry Furness and Mr. Edmund 
Hamilton Sears. "Jesus and his Biographers," 
which is the completest and best statement of Dr. 
Furness's exposition, recognizes with extreme grati- 
tude and respect his obligation to his instructor 
Professor Norton ; but its characteristic view — 
that the miracles, taken in their most literal sense, 
were the natural acts of such a soul as Jesus — 
not only was a great shock to the received opinion, 
but no one can read the rationalistic commentary 
of Paulus, without seeing how the two differ in 
their method only by a hair's-breadth, and how 
(consciously or not) the one has caught the manner 
and spirit of the other whom apparently he means 
to contradict. They have the same matter-of-fact 
way of taking the detail of narrative and of giving it 
a " natural " explanation, each in his own fashion. 
Allow for the thick, clumsy, dingy, ill-printed 
German volumes, and set beside them the fair, 
clean, trim, compact pages of the American press, — 
compare the scholastic method of the German 
erudite, who chiefly rejoices and expands in the dry 
light of criticism, with the religious beauty and 
tenderness that mark the later exposition, — and 
you have in the one, in many a familiar passage, 
only a transfigured likeness of the other. Mr. 
Sears's " Heart of Christ," T should say on the other 
hand, with perhaps a little less confidence, reflects, 
in the great sweetness and spiritual beauty of its 



38 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

exposition, the tone of Olshausen, that most devout 
and mystical of learned commentators, whose ortho- 
doxy of belief seems purely a phase of his senti- 
mental piety, and whose spirit is wonderfully 
winning as you begin to read him, whether or not 
you are long content with his intellectual view. 
Mr. Sears's refined and beautiful intelligence was 
the gracious channel through which that vein of 
influence flowed in, to the delight and comfort of 
many a kindred mind. 

I do not know of any theologian among us who 
has accepted seriously Strauss's mythical theory of 
interpreting the gospel narrative. It was taken up 
by Theodore Parker, while it was yet new, in the 
" Christian Examiner," in an admirable exposition 
and confutation ; and I do not remember any dis- 
cussion of it as a living issue among us since. In 
brief, it would make the supernatural parts of the 
Gospels a sort of allegory, or philosophical poem, 
founded on ideas current in Jewish tradition, and 
embodying in symbols certain facts and phases of 
the higher life of man. Especially such transcen- 
dental facts of the Gospel narrative as the Incar- 
nation, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the 
Resurrection and Ascension, are expounded frankly 
as " myths," — that is, philosophical ideas, or facts 
of the religious life, put in the form of narrative of 
real events, which are regarded as purely symbolic 
or allegorical. It is understood to be the product 
of what is called the school of Hegel " of the Left " 
in philosophy ; and, if one wishes to see how that 
general line of symbolic interpretation is carried 



D. F. STRAUSS. — F. C. BAUR. 39 

out through the field of fact and dogma, he might 
be advised, instead of studying the words of Strauss 
himself (which are foreign in tone, and more or less 
repellent to us), to find it in the writings of Drs. 
Hedge and Everett before cited, especially the 
former. 

Of far greater importance at this day. than the 
schools of criticism yet spoken of is what is known 
as the "Tubingen School," established and still 
largely controlled by the massive learning and 
masterly mind of Ferdinand Christian Baur. I 
have myself several times given public exposition 
of the method of this school and the results it 
seems to lead to, and shall say nothing of it now, 
except that it has been most fully, most intelli- 
gently, and best set forth before our public by that 
graceful scholar, that widely read theologian, that 
accomplished man of letters, Octavius Brooks Froth - 
ingham, — a man who inherits the elegant and 
fastidious refinement of our elder New England 
scholarship, and has added to it an intellectual 
breadth, a moral courage, and a mental vigor which 
put him conspicuously in the front rank of a 
younger school of theologians. 1 

I have now, as time allowed me, passed in review 
the influences, both religious and dogmatic or intel- 
lectual, which have come upon American Unitarian- 
ism during the last fifty years, while I have been 

1 When these words were spoken, Mr. Frothingham was by my 
side ; and the response they called forth must have convinced him, 
gratefully, how little the noble independence of his career had 
estranged him from the affection and honor of his earlier associates. 



40 GEEMAN INFLUENCE. 

a close and interested spectator in the field. There 
is one other thing which seems to me necessary, in 
order to make this survey complete. I have said 
already what were the dismay and repugnance with 
which that influence was first seen to be coming on. 

o 

To quote from Professor Norton's address on " The 
Latest Form of Infidelity " : " In Germany the 
theology of which I speak has allied itself with 
atheism, with pantheism, and with other irreligious 
speculations, that have appeared in those meta- 
physical systems from which the God of Christianity 
is excluded." Some of you may no doubt remember 
when the very name German was a sort of reproach, 
and any suspicion of that line of speculation was a 
stigma from which it was not easy for the young 
theologian to get absolved. Yet you have also 
lived to see one who as a young theologian most 
eagerly and with warmest sympathy followed that 
line of speculation, come nearer perhaps than any 
other man of education among us to the common 
thought and heart ; for, when I recall those early 
influences, I seem to find the popular embodiment 
of them all in James Freeman Clarke. 

Again, it seems to me clear that the life of re- 
ligious thought which has come down to us survives 
not in spite of, but in virtue of, those influences I 
have attempted to describe. I do not mean that 
the opinions of the present day are in better har- 
mony with the true religious life than those which 
prevailed fifty years ago. I do not think they are. 
At any rate, it is not for us to disparage that body 
of opinion which stayed the religious life of Chan- 



THE OPEN CHANNEL. 41 

ning, Tuckerman, and Henry Ware. What I do 
mean is, that to have shut down the gates against 
an intellectual tide so genuine and strong as was 
then setting in, would have been to turn what till 
then had been an open channel into a little land- 
locked creek, and to shut us out effectually from 
the large intellectual currents of our age. The 
alternative in that case would have been to strand 
in dry-rot, or to effect a breach by violence into the 
wider waters. There were those then who were 
willing to do either : Norton the one thing, Parker 
the other thing. But all of us, I think, are now 
agreed that the more excellent way was that taken 
by the younger scholars of that day, — Furness, 
Hedge, and Clarke being conspicuous in the group, 
— who set themselves to deepen the channel and 
keep it open, and won for us who follow them the 
free navigation of the sea. 

And this service of theirs turned, as you will 
have seen, upon the same point which Schleier- 
macher made the pivot of his first appeal to the 
German people : I mean his assertion that the 
religious life — with all there is in it of beauty and 
joy, of comfort, aspiration, strength, and hope — is 
its owti evidence and its own exceeding great reward ; 
and, while it is not without intellectual foundation 
of its own, is yet independent of all form, of specu- 
lative opinion. It was (humanly speaking) of in- 
finite importance for us at that time that this 
conviction should be well established. Doubtless 
it has had the ill effect of making some men loose, 
reckless perhaps, about holding firmly any clear 



42 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 

conviction at all about anything. But it has had 
the good effect, with very many more in whom 
opinion was wavering, to hold them still within 
the blessed circle of Christian fellowship, till 
character should be ripened, principle braced, and 
the mental tone invigorated. Thus it has quickened 
and refreshed the springs of spiritual life in the 
veins of our religious organization itself. 

Besides, as we must remember, the opinions then 
most dreaded — opinions touching the supernatural 
and miraculous in the ministry of Jesus — were 
not opinions invented by theologians, however 
radical. On the contrary, the most radical of 
theologians used every art of forced interpretation, 
of evasion, and of intellectual compromise, to escape 
the pressure of those opinions. If the old doctrinal 
view of the incarnation, the atonement, the resur- 
rection, and the miraculous works of Jesus has in 
any mind been weakened, dissolved, or washed 
away, it has been not by the theology which 
first exhausted every shift to save it, but by the 
science which in a pitiless flood beat and encroached 
upon it, in spite of those poor makeshifts. Within 
these fifty years many of us have had thrust upon 
us, again and again, first-hand testimony from be- 
lievers of facts as distinctly miraculous as anything 
in the New Testament, — facts which one or two 
hundred years ago would just as distinctly have 
received that interpretation ; yet we know perfectly 
well that such testimony, however vouched, would 
not stand an hour in any civilized court of justice, 
and so we quietly lay it by, whatever be our private 



THE BELIEF IN MIRACLES. 43 

opinion of its validity. It is just so with treatment 
of the miracles of the New Testament. Thousands 
among us receive them with the same faith, comfort, 
and reverence as of old. But not one of us thinks 
of defining the line of Christian fellowship by the 
acceptance of them ; not one of us would stake a 
single point of his own religious faith upon them; 
not one of us appeals to them as argument for the 
spiritual truth, but at most as what that " truth as 
it is in Jesus " may help us to accept. 

This change in the general intelligence has come 
about, reluctantly and with infinite protest, during 
the entire scientific revolution of the last two centu- 
ries. It has not been frankly accepted, among those 
calling themselves Christians, till comparatively late 
in the fifty years' period we have been looking back 
upon. But it had to reach not our scientific opin- 
ions merely, but our religious opinions. If the 
religious life survives among us in spite of it, this 
result is due, in no small part, to the influence upon 
our elder Unitarianism of German theology from 
the time of Schleiermacher. 



III. 

FORTY YEARS LATER. 

IN the course which comes to an end to-night, 1 
you have been studying one of those large 
movements of the human mind, whose advance is 
measured not by years, but by- centuries. The line 
of thought you have followed reaches back some- 
thing more than five hundred years. Certainly, it 
is a new heaven and a new earth that have come 
into view, since the slow and painful dissolution 
began, of that great structure which we call the 
Catholic civilization of the Middle Age, — a new 
heaven, revealed in the system of Copernicus, or 
through the telescope of Galileo ; a new earth, 
whose law of development, long foreshadowed, comes 
to be more clearly seen, by Darwin's and Spencer's 
help, in these last thirty years. 

And this change in the world's outward aspect 
is but a type of the more radical revolution in men's 
religious thought, — a revolution far costlier in 
conflict, tears, and blood. Its march is not a holi- 
day journey, but a campaign. Its victories are won 
by hard and painful strokes. The campaign is not 
always bloodless. It has not only its solitary vic- 

1 An Address delivered before the Brooklyn Association for 
Moral and Spiritual Education, May 30, 1886, 



THE MARCH OF THOUGHT. 45 

tims, like Giordano Bruno, burnt alive in Eome for 
his gospel of free-thinking ;_ but its martyr hosts, as 
the Huguenots and the English Puritans, who died 
in the hope of founding a free religious common- 
wealth. And, no doubt, the way will even yet be 
rough and painful, to us or to our children, before 
the present movement will have its fruit in a fully 
recovered harmony between men's knowledge and 
their faith. It is well to think of our subject thus 
at starting, in its severer and more heroic aspect ; 
and to feel that we ourselves have volunteered (not, 
let us hope, quite unworthily) in the service which 
it indicates of our common humanity. 

That march of thought you have sought to inter- 
pret, stage by stage, as it has borne upon those two 
chief interests of men's life, their morals and their 
religion. A march — in this present view of it — 
of five centuries, that began out of great obscurity, 
and has been followed with slow and hard-won 
steps. As it emerges in these latter days into a 
clearer field, we have a better understanding of what 
it is, and whither it is tending. It is to this later 
phase of it, for about a century back, that we give, 
in particular, the name " liberal movement ; " and 
you have asked me to attempt some exposition of 
the point it has come to, and the aspect it presents 
to-day. 

I am glad, and a little proud, to have this task 
assigned me. But, as I come to take it up, I find 
myself in a mood which I should like to explain in 
advance. For, I must confess, it does not prove 
so plain and easy a business as I might have hoped. 



46 FORTY YEARS LATER. 

The earlier phases of this movement, indeed, it is 
comparatively easy to interpret, as they settle into 
shape and take their place in history. We are well 
away from the passion and turmoil that beset them 
once. We think of them now as steps in an evo- 
lution determined in advance by the very nature of 
human thought and life. We feel nothing of the 
dread and horror the Eeformers felt at the mighty 
genius of papal Eome, that had created and for a 
thousand years controlled the Catholic Empire of 
the West. We calmly balance the right and wrong 
of the conflict waged against it by the valiant, 
heroic^ austere, and domineering creed which gives 
a lurid glory to the name of Calvin. We look back, 
it may be, with easy indifference to the sectarian 
controversies of sixty years ago, in which the dear- 
est interests of mankind seemed then to be at stake. 
We embark, with an easy confidence, on that widen- 
ing and gracious stream, which bears in its bosom 
the literature, the science, and the philosophic 
thought of our nineteenth century ; and these, by 
their blending with our religious thought, make the 
very definition of what we know as Liberalism. So 
far, our view is quite clear and undisturbed. But 
when we come square up to the hour in which we 
live and speak, and try to interpret that, we feel a 
sudden arrest. The abrupt challenge of that ques- 
tion — What is, after all, the aspect and the promise 
of this very moment of time ? — must give us pause. 
The scientific phase we talk of, indeed, quite con- 
fidently ; but of the social phase, which envelops 
and controls the scientific, who knows what symp- 



TWENTY-FIVE AND SIXTY-FIVE. 47 

toms may open on us unawares, this very coming 
month ? 

One may be pardoned at twenty-five for feeling 
very sure of the way he is going, and very sure that 
the great world is going the same way too. Look- 
ing as he does with one eye — the eye of hope — 
through a narrow tube, his vision is more keen than 
wide. Well for him that it is so ! I do not know 
how he should ever have courage to face the future, 
which makes the field where he must walk and 
work, if he had to see in advance all that he will 
look back on with the eye of experience before his 
work is done. Well for him that that future shows 
to him in the color of his own hope ! His aim in 
life (we will suppose) is ideal and intellectual, not 
mercenary and base. In that temper, he easily 
finds things as he wants to find them. Faith fur- 
nishes forth the substance of things hoped for, and 
the evidence of things not seen. Thus, " Your 
young men shall see visions ; " and this, as Lord 
Bacon tells us, is life's contrast against that dim, 
remote, uncertain glance upon the future, hinted in 
the phrase that follows : " Your old men shall 
dream dreams," — knowing, alas ! that they are 
dreams, whose real being is of the past. 

But the pardon found so easily at twenty- five 
will not be given him if forty years later he has 
only the same sanguine confidence, if he still finds 
the situation as clear and easy to be interpreted as 
he thought it then. Life has brought him in sharp 
collision with facts and forces, whose existence he 
had hardly begun to suspect. The " stream of 



48 FORTY YEARS LATER. 

tendency," whose course he thought so smooth and 
certain, turns out to be a turbulent flood, whose 
twisting eddies perplex his bearings as he tosses and 
spins upon its surface. Those forty years will have 
brought to the front many a revolution of opinion, 
many a political upheaval, the eclipse of many a 
shining reputation, many a social change wrought 
through blind passion, and involving unforeseen 
events. They will, further, have brought such 
advance and widening-out of general knowledge as 
to make the visible sphere he moves in quite 
another, a wider, a more bewildering thing. His 
thought moves painfully and slow amid the new 
surroundings. He envies and admires, it may be, 
the alacrity with which younger minds find free 
play in a scene that to him grows dim and unfa- 
miliar. He begins to feel that a younger hand 
must take and carry forward that torch of truth on 
which his grasp is slackening. He is less hardy 
and single-minded in his view, not because he has 
less faith, but because he knows more things. He 
sees more widely than he did, and so sees not so far 
or sharply in one direction as he thought he did. 
And his opinion is likely to be the calm assent that 
this is so wpon the whole, rather than the ardent 
assertion that this is surely so, and cannot be 
otherwise. 

Now I stand, in comparison with some of you, 
at the end of that term of forty years ; and I stand 
in something of that attitude of disadvantage. 
And, to simplify the task you have given me, I 
must begin by narrowing down my view : not try 



TO LIMIT THE FIELD. 49 

to span the wide horizon, but to look understand- 
ingly at one or two things that lie very near. Thus 
the present aspect of the liberal movement ought 
by right to include a great deal that I cannot so 
much as touch upon. Hardly a hint, for example, 
of those most interesting and kindred phases of 
it among the leaders of liberal thought in England ; 
still less the later aspects of German learning and 
speculation, or the instructive criticism that comes 
from the universities of Holland, or those rare, 
precious, and heroic strivings after a liberal the- 
ology that appear here and there — in France 
especially, but also in Italy and even Spain — in 
the field so long given over to bitter conflict be- 
tween the spiritual despotism of Eome and blank 
materialistic unbelief flaming out now and then 
in hot revolutionary hate. All these would be 
needed, to fill out an adequate picture of our time, 
taken from the point of view you have assigned 
me. But I am afraid that a sketch so wide and 
ambitious would be ineffective and thin. It is an 
ungrateful task to summarize a volume in the 
limits of a half-hour's essay. And because you 
have applied to me, who have spent these forty 
years, and more, in living contact with certain 
special phases of the liberal movement, and not in 
a far-away study of it as a whole, I shall deal with 
only that part of the wide field in which I have 
been an interested eyewitness, and in a small way 
a. worker. It is only with that small segment of 
our subject that I propose to deal ; only there, if 
anywhere, my word can be of any use. 

4 



50 FORTY YEAES LATER. 

Taking this point of view, then, I shall briefly 
trace some lines of comparison between the present 
and earlier stages of the liberal movement in these 
three respects, — its temper, its thought, and its 
aim ; and with this I shall mingle as I may some 
consideration of those practical aspects of it most 
plainly bearing upon the future. 

I. And first, as I look back upon that lapse 
of time, I do not seem to find liberalism so light 
of heart as forty years ago. Nay, I easily fancy 
that then the world itself was younger, and the 
spirit of the time was younger, as well as we who 
were living our youth then. Grave events, cruel 
disappointments, some of the darkest tragedies of 
history, have stamped their mark upon this period 
of time. How easily and how eagerly the human 
heart looks for the present coming of an age of 
gold ! How heavy and quick the shadow falls 
upon that fair vision ! Some of you may recall 
the glow of hope that greeted the revolutions of 
1848, that year of wonders, whose promise of 
liberty and peace was followed so soon by such 
thunderstorms and shocks of war. That type 
shows us in the world of politics what we so often 
find in the world of morals and thought. It seems 
impossible that with anybody the view of things 
should be so roseate and cheerful now as it was 
with almost everybody then. Our time, in com- 
parison with that, looks anxious, critical, and full 
of doubt. It is a long way from the serene gospel 
according to Emerson, in which all the higher 
faiths are taken for granted, to the labored theistic 



LESS OPTIMISTIC. 51 

arguments which are the last product of the Con- 
cord School. It is a long way from the easy op- 
timism that explored with so confident touch our 
chief social horrors, drunkenness, slavery, vice, and 
crime, to that sterner mood in which we live, tem- 
pered by the fire and blood of civil war, or taught 
by the slow revolution in society and the State 
that has been proceeding since. It is a long way 
from that fair Arcadia of Brook Farm, with its 
harmless socialistic theories and its amiable but 
rather futile idealizing of daily toil, to the obstinate 
labor-battles of this last month, and the red-handed, 
death-dealing anarchism of Chicago. 

The first aspect, then, in which the liberal move- 
ment presents itself to my mind at this time, is the 
contrast that it shows to the easy and optimistic 
idealism of forty years ago. Looked at externally, 
the change is a little saddening. But if we look 
to the temper of mind that meets it, we find that 
it is a healthy and a promising change. The manly 
and brave temper is that which chooses to look 
facts in the face and see the worst of them, rather 
than brood upon them in the illusive glow of 
Utopian dreams. Anything like advance to a bet- 
ter knowledge of the situation is had by dealing 
first-hand with the facts of human nature, includ- 
ing its malign and dangerous passions as well as 
its radiant possibilities. That, I think, is more 
the temper of liberalism in our day than it was 
forty years ago. Those darker facts of men's life, 
those evil passions of the mind, are what religion- 
ists of earlier time hated and fought against as 



52 FOETY YEAES LATEE. 

enemies of God, desiring to see their face openly. 
And in this regard, we have better understanding 
than earlier liberals had of the heroic side of that 
elder faith. 

For, in its first form, religions liberalism is simply 
a movement away from the creeds and institutions 
of the past, with the heavy bondage they laid upon 
the human spirit, toward the breadth, the freedom, 
the wealth of the world's larger life. The fresh 
consciousness of this is a keen sense of emancipa- 
tion, it is the joy of a new-found liberty. Deliver- 
ance from the ancient terror, — terror before the 
inexorable Judge whom theologians have depicted ; 
terror of devils that assailed the soul in all un- 
guarded hours ; terror of the eternal hell, whose 
fiery torment has so been held out before the naked 
conscience ; terror at the thought of blasphemy in 
casting off beliefs that have grown to be flat unrea- 
son, while the mind yet shrinks from looking its 
honest thought in the face, — deliverance from that 
manifold " terror of the Lord " is enough, at first, to 
fill the soul with a great joy. It seems, for the 
time, as if it were alone ample to supply the fulness 
of the religious life. Only leave that vague dark 
dread behind, and the whole soul is flooded with 
kindly light. 

That is the first flush of feeling in the new eman- 
cipation ; and that was, very largely, the spirit of 
the younger liberalism with which we compare our 
own. It was as if we had abolished those dark 
facts of life, of which the old dogma was but the 
symbol ; as if there were no longer any such thing 



THE CHANGE FOR GOOD. 53 

as depravity in human nature, when we had once 
denied the dogma of its innate corruption; as if 
there were no divine wrath that blazed against 
wrongdoing, when once we had got over our dread 
of a future hell. A radiant humanity found nothing 
anywhere but good. Misery and pain, it thought, 
were to be banished at a word out of the conditions 
of men's lives. Ah ! but it forgot that chaos and 
horror of men's passions which have furnished from 
the beginning the imagery, the apprehension, and 
the foretaste of eternal doom. 

We have learned, too, that religion itself, as a 
power in the soul, is its own joy and exceeding 
great reward. Here, too, we have come into better 
understanding of the ancient creed. With all its 
narrowness and error, we still see that while it was 
honestly and bravely held, it brought to its adhe- 
rents an heroic temper to fight stoutly as the Lord's 
champions in the battle against wrong. It brought, 
too, great gladness of heart and a peace which passed 
understanding, from the mere fact that it was a 
religion, — that it meant the surrender of the soul 
to that which was worshipped as highest, holiest, 
best. That heroism remained, that joy and peace 
remained, of the faith that had been as the soul of 
goodness in an evil creed. 

At least, if it did not remain, we have learned 
better to understand its loss ; for the old foes have 
been about us with new faces. And, in these forty 
years since the early flush of our newly emancipated 
liberalism, there is not so much to boast of our own 
better success in dealing with those old foes as to 



54 FORTY YEARS LATER. 

give us any very complacent sense of the superiority 
of our ways over the former ways. And so the pres- 
ent temper of liberalism is soberer, more modest of 
itself, less apt and confident in its claim, less proud 
of its achievement ; and it is well for us that it is so. 
II. The second aspect of the liberal movement 
now, in comparison with forty years ago, is that it 
seeks a scientific rather than a sentimental, mystic, 
or idealistic expression of itself. Any movement of 
religious thought implies these two things. It aims, 
first, to state with authority what is the deepest 
ground of trust and the most imperative law of 
conduct : that is the sphere of personal religion, 
dealing with the individual heart and conscience. 
It aims, secondly, to train and stimulate the intelli- 
gence, by setting forth, both to the mind and im- 
agination, the largest and most general view we are 
able to get of the universe and of human life in its 
broadest relations : that is the sphere of religion 
intellectually, dealing with the speculative under- 
standing. Now, regarding the former, I do not see 
that religion as a spiritual force in men's lives has 
changed in the least from what it was when the 
Vedic Hymns or the Hebrew Psalms or the trage- 
dies of iEschylus were composed. Life brings men 
face to face, now as then, with the same great won- 
der and glory of the heavens, with the same stormy 
passions or gentler affections of the heart, with the 
same bitter experiences of pain and grief and guilt, 
with the same dark problem and mystery of the 
human lot. As to either of these, I do not see that 
our attitude, morally regarded, has changed at all 



EMERSON'S THREE WORDS. 55 

since the earliest time of recorded thought. The 
only solution to the enigma of life, as it touches us 
personally, is that which consists in the reconcilia- 
tion of heart and conscience to the conditions of 
each man's particular lot in life. The key of this 
reconciliation is found, now as ever, in the words 
" obedience and trust and help." These words have 
to do with life itself, not with our thoughts about 
life ; their meaning is to the heart, not to the under- 
standing ; the method they indicate is the method 
not of science, but of faith. By that method, and 
by that alone, we are able to solve the problem of 
life practically, which we can never solve theoreti- 
cally. That practical solving of it is what we call 
salvation. Toward any speculative solution of it, I 
am unable to see that science or philosophy has 
advanced us a single step. 

Now, it is just within these forty years that 
science has made its most brilliant effort, and seems 
to have all but fulfilled its promise, to do that very 
thing. Consider, for a moment, the change that has 
come about in our mental habit. Forty years ago 
the most advanced religious thinking was purely of 
the type known as transcendental ; that is, it was 
speculation upon data and postulates furnished by 
the religious sentiment. The three great words 
which more than any other marked the advent and 
set the key of that phase of the liberal movement 
were spoken in Emerson's "Nature" in 1836, his 
appeal to the "American Scholar" in 1837, and his 
Divinity School Address in 1838. The last two of 
these I heard as they were spoken ; and — though 



56 FOETY YEARS LATER. 

dimly and confusedly, out of my deep ignorance — 
I felt with a sense I can yet recall the breath and 
pulse of the new era then opening upon us. And I 
do not yet see that that fresh inspiration has lost 
its charm or its power or its use. 

But, as soon as we think of what now appeals to 
our chief intellectual interest, we find ourselves in 
another atmosphere, — chill, gray, and bracing, when 
we compare it with that warmth and glow. We 
have lost the secret of that willing and radiant faith. 
We yield belief only where fact has had the verifica- 
tion of scientific tests ; we feel assured only where 
experience has bodied forth the meaning of the 
word. Thus the great and certain verities of the 
religious life, as they were then thought of, — God, 
Freedom, and Immortality, — we submit to tests 
which no one demanded then, and bestow upon 
them interpretations which no one would have 
admitted then. Theories of the universe, which 
formerly were purely speculative or religious, — the 
origin of the visible heavens, the development of 
life upon our planet, the law of the Providence that 
rules in human history ; theories of life, dealing with 
the laws of health, the laws of character, the laws 
of sanity, the laws of population, wealth and pov- 
erty, the laws of crime, — are constructed on scien- 
tific data and dealt with by scientific methods. For 
providential rule, we have the law of evolution ; for 
the " sacred history " of our younger days, we have 
the study of " comparative religions," which becomes 
as mere a branch of human science as that of com- 
parative philology; and so with all the rest. 



SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 57 

This, I say, is the change which has come about 
within the recollection of some of us, marking 
strongly one present aspect of the liberal movement. 
On the whole, it is better to welcome this phase of 
our religious thought, and make the best of it, than 
to criticise or vituperate it as Carlyle and Euskin 
have done so bitterly. 1 But we may say of it that 
it attempts too much. Take the two phrases most 
commonly in use to express the conscious attitude 
of men's thought toward the highest of intellectual 
problems, — "a Scientific Theism " and " the Idea of 
God," — and I think we may say of both of them 
that, so far as it is a religious theism we mean, and 
not merely a cosmic speculation, it goes before our 
premises, it underlies our processes, and makes 
a supplement to our deductions : like Newton's 
" Scholium " at the end of his Principia, which 
gives an eloquent statement of his own belief, but 
was certainly not proved by his differential calculus. 
So the form of theistic argument most familiar to us 
at this day may be regarded as the cropping out of a 
conviction implanted by a devout Christian train- 
ing rather than a logical deduction from the prem- 
ises that have been assumed. And the result, upon 
the whole, we may find to be this : that religion, 
with its implicit faiths, abides as a primary element 

1 Thus from Mr. Ruskin : " I know of nothing that has been 
taught the youth of our time, except that their fathers were apes 
and their mothers winkles ; that the world began in accident and 
will end in darkness ; that honor is a folly, ambition a virtue, charity 
a vice, poverty a crime, and rascality the means of all wealth and 
the sum of all wisdom. Both Mr. Carlyle and I knew perfectly 
well all along what would be the outcome of that education." 



58 FORTY YEAKS LATER. 

in human nature ; that it must be accepted, where 
it is accepted at all, on its own merits, and not on 
those of any logic ; that natural science must. waive 
the attempt to solve that problem of the universe 
which has proved beyond the grasp of speculative 
philosophy. Thus we learn that the true province of 
Eeligion must be experience and duty of the life 
that now is, not vain strivings to fathom the Eternal 
and Unknown ; and the true province of Science 
will be to explain not the ultimate ground of things, 
or the primary motive of right and duty, but the 
real conditions under which men's work on earth 
may be more effectually done. 

III. And so we come to a third aspect of the 
liberal movement, more characteristic and more full 
of powerful appeal to our hope and fear than either 
of the others. I mean, that the questions it raises 
are not those of theory, but of life, — questions of 
ethics and questions of social order. There is a 
singular consent, all along the line, in turning away 
from interests merely speculative, and facing the 
problems of human life. Not merely that societies 
for " ethical culture " take the place of societies pro- 
fessedly religious ; not merely that greater attention 
is given, in pulpits and religious journals, to the 
social questions of the day ; but that, with multi- 
tudes, their real religion, the only religion they pre- 
tend to know, is that which deals with secular 
concerns and is inspired with secular passion. A 
man's religion is that which makes to him the ideal 
thing in life ; that which he believes in so heartily 
that he holds any other gain, or life itself, cheap in 



QUESTIONS OF LIFE, NOT THEORY. 59 

comparison with it. Thus, that which makes a 
nihilist or an anarchist ready to suffer and die for 
his horrible creed is the same religious frenzy that 
inspires a cannibal war-dance, and that made the 
priests of Baal howl aloud and gash themselves with 
knives. The fervent passion of a " Nationalist," 
whose true religion is Ireland, is the same thing 
with the Messianic passion of the Jews, which after 
ages have exalted into a symbol, and made the 
central fact of religious history. The creed of 
Calvin, for which men freely fought and bled three 
hundred years ago, has faded to a mere chimera ; it 
is no longer a genuine religion — that is, a flaming 
and dominant passion of the human heart — with 
anybody in our day. What has come to take its 
place is not the serene platitudes of a speculative 
theology ; not the " cosmic theism " or the " scientific 
theism " which builds itself up, as an intellectual 
deduction, upon the foundations of modern knowl- 
edge. It is rather the keen interest, the patient 
service, the sacrifice of personal indulgence, the 
spirit kindling to moral enthusiasm and a passion of 
self-devotion, that drafts and enlists men as loyal 
champions in the battle for right, for truth, for 
human welfare. Just in proportion as the fires of 
old controversy fade, as the mind falls back, baffled 
and weary, from its search after the infinite and 
unknowable, just in that proportion the faith and 
zeal, of which the human heart has shown itself 
capable, come to be devoted to that attainable ideal 
which in pious phrase we call the Kingdom of God 
upon earth. 



60 FORTY YEARS LATER. 

At least, that great hope which lays hold upon 
the future, even (we may say) the possibility of any 
religion at all for mankind in the coming time, 
seems to depend on the vital reality of that phase in 
our movement which is ethical and social. It has 
nothing to do with denial of or indifference toward 
those sublimer conceptions, — a Living God as the 
soul of things, and Immortal Life as the inspiration 
of men's hope : on the contrary, the more vividly 
these are conceived, the deeper and surer the motive 
of that service of humanity. But " pure religion 
and undefiled," as James says, consists in that very 
service, not in any dreams or speculations or opin- 
ions of men. And, of that liberal movement we are 
studying, the most hopeful aspect is that it has en- 
tered upon that phase. 

It were a waste of time to cite here the innumer- 
able illustrations that appear in every channel where 
there is the least activity of religious thought. But 
our business is with that which is properly included 
in " the liberal movement." Wherever, indeed, 
those human feelings and motives have colored the 
exposition of religion, there we find a liberalism of 
heart wider than any creed and embracing many. 
But it has often happened that religious thinkers, 
professedly liberal, have been the pioneers and the 
shapers-out of work taken up then and pushed by 
other hands. Such work may be semi-secular, like 
education and prison-reform, which got their first 
great impulse so ; or it may be purely humanitary 
and moral. I have just received from that veteran 
leader in religious liberalism, Francis William New- 



KELIGION OF HUMANITY. 61 

man, now just closing his eighty -first year, — a man 
whose singular intellectual candor and restless ac- 
tivity of thought go along with an equal fervor of 
spirit touching all human needs, — a pamphlet in 
which he sets forth, with more than youthful ardor 
of conviction, the five " new crusades " of our own 
day against five gross evils of modern society, — 
slavery, now happily extinct ; drunkenness, screened 
by statute right and fostered by executive favor ; the 
shelter of vice under laws especially offensive and 
insulting to women ; that special horror of great 
capitals assailed by the White Cross League ; and 
the enormous guilt of war as a recognized court of 
appeal for nations. In all these — and just as much 
in the peril that comes with the new conditions of 
modern industry, the distress and alarm of the great 
labor-battle, the " red terror " of social anarchy, the 
chronic task of disinfecting our party politics — we 
see the need both of the severe, calm guidance of the 
scientific spirit, and of a deep religious devotion of 
the heart to human welfare. 

These things, and such as these, are in our day 
the special tasks of " the Eeligion of Humanity." 
It is in keeping with the spirit of our liberal move- 
ment from the beginning, that practical and not 
theoretical interests should be its main concern ; 
that it should more and more become an ethical and 
social, not a speculative movement ; that its learning 
shall not degenerate to pedantry, or its higher cul- 
ture to dilettantism ; that its science shall be turned 
from being a mere minister of material gain, or a 
mere method and illustration of barren meditation 



62 FORTY YEARS LATER. 

upon the universe, into a help and a guide for the 
effectual working-out of those most necessary tasks. 

These, then, appear to me the most instructive 
aspects of the liberal movement, as it has come down 
to us, to be guided by our hands : 1. An increasing 
seriousness of temper, as compared with the buoyant 
optimism of forty years ago ; 2. The clearer recogni- 
tion and acceptance of the method of science, as 
compared with that of pure sentiment and specula- 
tion ; 3. The attempting of positive tasks, or the 
study of positive problems of ethics, especially of 
social ethics, instead of resting content in the intel- 
lectual joy and pride of discovery of truth, or eman- 
cipation from mental error. Into this large and 
generous and real and consecrated liberalism, it is 
(as we may trust) our great privilege to have at 
length arrived. 



IV. 
FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

DR. HEDGE'S grandfather, Lemuel Hedge, was 
a country minister in Warwick, Massachu- 
setts, a stout Loyalist in the time of the Revolution, 
whose patriot neighbors made life a burden to him 
in consequence. To the eldest of his six boys there 
fell, as by birthright, the privilege of going to col- 
lege, while a sturdy younger son, Levi, of stronger 
brain and hand, was apprenticed to a master mason ; 
but at the age of twenty, or thereabout, laying down 
brick and trowel, resolutely won his way to the 
only higher education then known, and became a 
professor of logic and metaphysics in Harvard Col- 
lege, and the father of our eminent theologian and 
teacher, the subject of this sketch. The son kept in 
his mind a pretty image of his maternal grand- 
mother, daughter of President Holyoke of Harvard, 
whom tradition pictured as a bright young girl, 
standing on an insulated stool and holding an elec- 
tric chain, while she offered her laughing lip in 
challenge to whatever daring youth should advance 
to touch. Experimental science was young and gay 
in those good days ! A great-uncle on the same 
side was Edward Augustus Holyoke, a physician of 
Salem, who died in 1829 at something over the age 



64 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

of one hundred, — a man of methodical ways, ad- 
dicted to scientific observation, and of a repute in 
his profession which, I suppose, gave to his young 
relative, who knew him, the feeling, which he never 
quite outgrew, that in choosing another path he had 
forsaken his own true vocation. 

Of such parentage and antecedents Frederic Henry 
Hedge was born, on the 12th of December, 1805, two 
years younger than Emerson, three years younger 
than Eurness, his two nearest life-long friends. Of 
his school days little can be known, since his schol- 
arly calling was declared so early that, as he has 
told me, he never had a purer delight in letters than 
in committing to memory, at seven, the Eclogues of 
Virgil in the original, and at ten he knew by heart 
long passages of Homer in Greek. This means that 
he could have had no companions in study, and no 
class rivalry to cramp or cheer. But a young man 
of uncommon genius and scholarship, George Ban- 
croft, then in college, became an inmate of the 
father's family, and tutor to the boy ; and it shows 
in the father a singular confidence in both, that, 
when the boy was thirteen and the tutor a graduate 
of eighteen, they were sent together across the 
ocean to become, the one a student of philosophy, 
and the other a pupil in a classical school, in Ger- 
many, where, absolutely among strangers, he passed 
the next four years. I once persuaded him, when 
he had pleased himself for some weeks in recalling 
incidents of this period, to put them in the form of 
an autobiographical sketch. It was in the interval 
just before his grievous malady of the spring of 



AT SCHOOL IN GERMANY. 65 

1887 ; and it was in a respite of that lingering 
torment that he gave me the few pages that fol- 
low — the only consecutive memorials that he has 
left behind, of a career in which there was so much 
of interest to tell : — 

At the age of thirteen, having first been duly in- 
stituted in the mysteries of the German language at a 
private pension, I was put to school at a gymnasium in 
north Germany, situated in a romantic valley among 
the southward-stretching spurs of the Harz, permeated 
by a small stream fordable in summer, swelled to a 
roaring torrent by the melting snows of winter, and 
washing the base of the Herzberg, a mountain some- 
what less than a thousand feet in height. 

The school buildings, a congeries of quadrangles 
with other structures, including a church, had once 
beeri a monastery : the boys' rooms, stretching along 
two or three corridors, were the identical cells 
formerly occupied by the monks, rooms about ten 
feet square, with little bedrooms {Kammerri) attached. 
They had stone floors and were heated by stoves, — 
one stove to every two rooms, the mouth opening on 
the corridor and closed by a lock of which the cale- 
factor kept the key. Underneath the portion of the 
building inhabited by the officers and scholars was 
the crypt, lined with perpendicular tombstones, each 
faced with an effigy in relief of the sainted brother 
who slumbered beneath. Through this crypt the 
truant boy, admitted by the calefactor, who served as 
janitor, had to pass, with such courage as he might, 
when after dark the upper doors were closed. The 
school church was also the church of the Flecken, 
the small town that leaned to the cloister, though 

5 



66 FEEDEEIC HENEY HEDGE. 

governed by a magistrate of its own. The students 
with the teachers occupied the transept, the towns- 
people the nave. 

My coming was awaited with much curiosity by 
the youths who were to be my fellow-students. 
They expected to see a copper-colored savage : they 
were met by a boy as white .as the whitest of their 
own race, with no more of the savage than belongs to 
the boy in every clime. 

And yet these fellows were acquainted with the 
history of this country, and could have passed a 
better examination concerning it than the average 
of American boys in those days. They knew that 
the people of the United States were English, not 
Indians. But such is the difference between book- 
knowledge and ideas practically appropriated and 
assimilated by the mind, and such was the glamour 
attending the word " America ; " in the early years 
of this century, the geographical confusion of ideas 
respecting this somewhat extended continent is in- 
credible. When about to leave Germany on my 
homeward journey, I was requested by a learned 
professor to make inquiry concerning his wife's 
brother who had emigrated to America: when last 
heard from, he was in Surinam. 

My schoolmates gathered around the little stranger. 
They made much of me. The hazing usually prac- 
tised on new-comers was forborne, instead of which, 
with true German Wissbegier, they assailed me with 
questions about tropical plants and tropical animals, 
as if all America lay in the torrid zone. 

The staff of instructors consisted of the director, 
the rector, the conrector, three collaborators, and a 
French teacher of his own language, who resided in 



THE SCHOOL DISCIPLINE. 67 

the Flecken. The Director Brohm spoke English 
with ease, and was more inclined to grant my requests 
if I addressed him in that language. 

The official intercourse between pupils and teachers, 
outside of the lecture-room or social communion, was 
conducted in Latin. For example, if a student 
wished to be excused from attendance on the ex- 
ercises of the day, he aegrotirte, as we called it; that 
is, he pleaded illness, — it might be real or it might 
be shammed, — and on that ground wrote a letter 
addressed to all the teachers, to be circulated among 
them by our Mercury, the calefactor, on this wise : 

Viri honoratissimi ! 

Ut mihi aegrotanti (or ob capitis dolores, or purgandi 
causa) hodie a lectionibus vestris abesse liceat rogo petoque. 

Signed by the student. 

But this privilege had its price. The aegrotirende 
must not leave the cloister, and must have no dinner 
but a plate of soup and a piece of dry bread. If he 
was really ill, what needed he more ? If he shammed, 
let him take the consequences, which for a healthy 
boy with good appetite and love of muscular exercise 
might be supposed to counterbalance the satisfaction 
of idleness. 

In like manner, sentence of punishment adjudged 
by a teacher was given in Latin. Of punishment there 
were three grades, — Carenz, loss of dinner, Klosterar- 
rest, detention within doors, and Carcerstrafe, incarce- 
ration. Accordingly, the sentence would read : Schulz 
or Kurz ob negligentiam, or ob contumaciam, or, if the 
Latin for any particular offence did not come readily 
to mind, ob causas sibi cognitas, hodie prandio carebit, 
or per triduum ne coenobio exeat, or carceris poenam 



68 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

sxibeat. The career, or prison, was a room in the attic 
in which the student was locked up for one or two 
days, with tasks sufficient to occupy the solitary hours 
and prevent the morbid action of the mind. 

The discipline, if superficially strict, was not 
searching and not quickening. Our rooms were 
visited several times each day, always twice in the 
evening, — once at nine, when the teacher whose turn 
it was came to our desks to see what we were doing, 
and again at eleven to see that we were in bed. On 
Sundays we were marshalled into church ; but, once 
there, devout attention to the service, if expected, 
was certainly not enforced. A teacher in the op- 
posite side of the transept was supposed to be 
watching us ; but the inspection did not prevent our 
conversing freely or amusing ourselves with a novel, 
except in winter, when the bitter cold kept us in a 
state of torpor amounting almost to suspended ani- 
mation. Such cold within doors I had never before 
experienced, and have never experienced since. 

The gymnasium supplied us with two meals daily, 
one at noon and one at six p. m. We sat at long tables, 
each table presided over by one of the teachers. We 
were well served, and had no reason to complain of 
our fare, although complaints were not wanting. At 
the upper table one of the Primaner read aloud ac- 
cording to monastic tradition. But the books selected 
for that use were not works of monkish or any other 
theology: they were not chosen with a view to edifi- 
cation, but for entertainment solely, mostly works of 
fiction. 

Our breakfasts we had to provide for ourselves out 
of our weekly pocket-money. Each student furnished 
himself with an apparatus for cooking with charcoal, 



SCHOOL DELIGHTS. 69 

and with such table furniture as he could afford. The 
cooking was a pleasant occupation ; but the washing 
of the vessels was an onerous business, not very rigo- 
rously discharged. Only when a cup became so en- 
crusted as to seriously contract its capacity, it was 
found necessary to cleanse it for fresh deposits. 
Some of the boys became adepts in brewing coffee or 
chocolate, and invited others to test their proficiency 
in that useful art. A Chocoladeschmaus (chocolate 
feast) was a favorite entertainment, to which of a 
Sunday afternoon the knowing would ask their 
friends. 

If the discipline was in some respects strict, it was 
variously relieved. Sometimes we were taken on a 
walk to the nearest city, about five miles distant, to 
see a play or an elephant. One of our teachers had a 
fancy for pyrotechnics, and gave us an occasional en- 
tertainment in that kind. Twice every year the stu- 
dents were allowed to give a ball, to which ladies 
within a circuit of ten miles were invited, but none of 
the other sex, the youths themselves officiating as 
partners. The dancing lasted all night, relieved at 
intervals by drinking of bishop 1 and other refection, 
which caused a good deal of aegrotiren on the follow- 
ing day. Indeed, if I remember rightly, the day suc- 
ceeding the ball was decreed a holiday. 

A marked peculiarity of this gymnasium was an 
organization of the students for self-government, inde- 
pendent of the teachers, and supposed to be unknown 
to them. Boys who had reached the age of sixteen, 
and who had spent a year and a half at the school, 
constituted a senate called the " Veterans." These 
exercised an absolute and undisputed sway over the 

1 A weak concoction of spirituous liquors. 



70 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

younger portion. There was a written code of laws, 
to which each new-comer was required to sign his 
allegiance. He then received his cloister name, con- 
ferred by the veterans, — a sobriquet suggested by 
some personal peculiarity, to which he must respond 
when called by a senior, though not allowed in return 
to address a senior of a year's standing by the cloister 
name which that senior bore among his peers. 

The code contained provisions for the protection of 
the weak against the oppression of his stronger mates. 
If a boy was bullied by another for whom he was 
physically no match, he had only to say to his perse- 
cutor, Ich chasse Sie, " I bid you leave me," and the 
intercourse between the two was stopped at once. 
For if, after that magic formula had been pronounced, 
the bully should continue his persecution, an appeal to 
the veterans would subject him to a sound thrashing. 
The non-intercourse between the two was usually of 
short duration, but could only be terminated by an 
offer of reconciliation by the chasser, who would say 
to the chassed, Soil es wieder gut sein ? " Shall we 
be friends again ? " If a student had been guilty of 
meanness, such, for example, as cheating at play or 
informing against a fellow-student, the veterans in 
council decreed that he be sent to Coventry, or, as the 
phrase now is, "boycotted," for a definite term. Who- 
ever should speak to him during that period would be 
visited with the same penalty. 

Boys under the age of twelve in Germany address 
each other with the second person singular, du; but the 
gymnasium brings a transition to adult speech. The 
gymnasiast is addressed and addresses his mates with 
the customary third person plural, Sie ; but if two of 
these youngsters are smitten with a mutual liking, 



SCHOOL INSTRUCTION. 71 

they agree to use the more familiar second person 
singular : Sollen wir uns du nennen ? I seemed to 
notice that such treaties of amity were most often 
formed when wine was circulating. But they sur- 
vived the festive hour. 

As an evidence of the democratic spirit which, pre- 
vails in academic life, I may mention that, though 
many of the boys in this school were sons of noble- 
men, and some of them of the highest rank, no dis- 
crimination was made by pupil or teacher in favor of 
these high-born youths. 

If the discipline, as I have said, was not quicken- 
ing, neither was* the instruction fructifying. For 
boys so young, it partook too much of the university 
method of teaching by lectures. Too little prepara- 
tion was required of the pupil. Many of these, it is 
true, took notes of the lectures with all the assiduity 
so caustically recommended by Mephistopheles when 
lie personates Faust in the play; but they were not 
examined on their notes, and the question of promo- 
tion to a higher class or detention in a lower was 
determined by no very rigorous test. For myself, I 
seem on looking back to have made but little progress 
while there, except in writing Latin, the one exercise 
that was rigorously enforced. 

After nearly two years spent in this school, I was 
transferred to Schulpforte. And what a change ! 
Schulpforte was then, as it is still, a Prussian institu- 
tion, and manifested in its discipline, its vitality, its 
thoroughness, the care of the best government of 
modern time. It was a pet of that government, and 
was often visited by the minister of instruction in 
person. It lies on the Saale, about thirty miles from 
Leipsic and sixteen from Weimar. It constitutes a 



72 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

community by itself, independent of any municipal 
control. The main building, or collection of attached 
buildings, including a church, like the other school 
had once been a monastery. Other detached edifices, 
among them the house of Amtmann, or purveyor, had 
sprung up around the central mass. An extensive 
playground, with bowling-alleys and gymnastic ap- 
paratus, formed part of the establishment. The 
whole was enclosed with a wall of a mile or more in 
circumference. This wall no one of the alumni 
proper was without special permission allowed to 
pass. 

The term alumni proper requires explanation. For 
Prussian citizens, Schulpforte was a free school. A 
limited number of Prussian youth were educated at 
the cost of the government. These were the alumni 
proper. They had no single rooms, but, when not in 
the class-rooms, were distributed through several 
spacious apartments, presided over by a senior who 
superintended their studies and gave them special in- 
struction in addition to their class-work. At night 
they were lodged in large dormitories. 

But, in addition to the Prussian alumni, the school 
was open to boys from other States, either German or 
foreigners, who were called Kostgdnger (boarders). 
They were domesticated with the professors, and had 
rooms of their own or shared by a single chum, and 
paid for board and tuition. I had the good fortune to 
be boarded by Dr. Koberstein, who has written the 
most complete history of German literature. My 
chum was young Baron von Munchhausen, nephew of 
the veritable but unveracious story-teller of that 
name. 

The staff of instructors consisted of a rector, a con- 



SCHULPFOETE. 73 

rector, five professors, and four adjuncti, or tutors, — 
a considerably larger number of teachers than Harvard 
could boast in my college days. To these must be 
added the pastor, the physician, the Kapellmeister, or 
director of music, a drawing-master, a dancing-master, 
and in summer a swimming-master. 

The course of study, though more effectively pur- 
sued, was much the same as in other gymnasia; but 
special attention was given to Greek composition and 
to Latin verses. As an illustration of the former, I 
may mention that a Pfortner translated Goethe's 
Iphigenie into Greek, of which translation 'a copy was 
presented to the poet by a committee chosen to wait 
upon him. 

The making of Latin verses was one of the require- 
ments of the semi-annual examination. The materia 
poetica was dictated in portions adjusted to the rank 
of each class. A Primaner had, I think, a hundred 
hexameters to exhibit. The one who accomplished 
this Pensum first signalized his triumph by ringing 
the great bell. This was done twice while I was 
there by Wilhelm Ranke, brother of the historian, 
who was also a graduate of Schulpforte. 

Having gone so far, the tired hand stopped, and 
refused to take up the task again : once more it was 
holclen " by a sort of fate." He commissioned me 
to do what I would with it, and even dictated a few 
sentences as a sort of sequel. The substance of them 
was that at Schulpforte his mind opened to a knowl- 
edge of what is meant by a life of thought and 
letters ; and, above all, that " here I came to know 
Goethe." But an anecdote or tw T o may serve to 
piece out the too fragmentary sketch. Thus it is 



74 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

odd in this day to hear of his long walk in the 
country with his tutor, who would keep up his 
pupil's spirits by a glass of undiluted gin ; and the 
tales are wonderful of the aptness of the more 
advanced students in their exercises of Latin verse ; 
and he showed me once, in the " album " of those 
days (a portfolio of very modest engravings), the 
autograph of his school-friend and chum, Carl von 
Munchhausen, nephew and heir of that veracious 
traveller, the far-celebrated baron. Munchhausen 
was the better mathematician, and Hedge the better 
linguist, so that they were often helpful to each 
other in their school tasks ; and it happened 
once that when the former was to be " confirmed " 
by the Lutheran rite, and was much put to it how 
to word his indispensable confession in Latin, the 
draft was truthfully and skilfully composed for him 
by his friend. Truly, one might say, a school-boy 
has not lived in vain, to whose lot it has fallen to 
write " the confessions of Baron Munchhausen " ! A 
more serious event in this friendship befell, when the 
two agreed together to swim a somewhat powerful 
river. The Saxon boy was the sturdier, and came 
safely across, when turning he saw his companion the 
American gasping helpless in the stream, and just 
about to drown : he succeeded in dragging him 
out, quite unconscious ; and, ignorant what to do, 
stretched him on the warm sand, where that and 
the sun's rays presently brought him back to life. 

Eeturning to America at the end of 1822, he was 
first beguiled into a tedious boat-passage down the 
Elbe ; then long kept in port by the sickness of the 



AT HAEVARD COLLEGE. 75 

captain of the poor little ship ; then, when the cap- 
tain had died in Hamburg, was forced to put to sea 
with an incompetent mate for commander, to face 
a long and terrible winter voyage to New York. 
However, he was not conscious of the real danger, 
and remembered most distinctly the water famine 
when they were becalmed in the Gulf Stream and 
were reduced to a pint a day, and his effort to 
wash in water baled from the sea, which was too 
noisome and horrible to be touched, — this, with 
the overland journey home, when he had to trudge 
beside the stage-coach through the blocking snow- 
drifts of Worcester County. Little hints like these 
help fill out the picture of the cheery, sturdy, valiant 
lad of seventeen, fighting his way through such cold 
welcome to the home where his academic honors 
were to be won. 

The date of his graduation at Harvard College, in 
the class of Charles Francis Adams and Horatio 
Greenough, in 1825, very nearly touches the high- 
water mark of that wave of intellectual enthusiasm 
which for the space of a generation identified the 
college with the best life of New England more 
closely than, probably, it has ever been before or 
since. The rise of that wave was first made plainly 
visible in the installation of President Kirkland 
in 1810 ; its flow included the college careers of 
Everett, Frothingham, Walker, Bancroft, and Em- 
erson ; its shining crest was when, in 1824, Ed- 
ward Everett, in his Phi Beta Kappa oration, paid 
eloquent homage to Lafayette as the guest of the 
nation and a hero of two worlds, — a moment which 



76 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

is still looked back to, by living witnesses, as the 
most splendid in that period of their young pride 
and hope. It will be noticed that the character of 
this mental epoch was almost purely literary, rhetor- 
ical, or philosophic : of those just named, President 
Walker was the only one who gave his mind seri- 
ously to study the scientific method in its effect on 
the intellectual life ; and he was by profession a 
theologian and moralist, not himself a man of scien- 
tific method as a thinker. All the best intellectual 
work of the period was shaped and toned by the 
exigencies of popular speech, rather than the severer 
logic of the Schools. Even grave chapters of his- 
tory, theology, or metaphysics, in such hands, be- 
came a series of eloquent addresses rather than 
steps in a methodical essay. Even the severely 
disciplined mind of such a scholar as Dr. Hedge 
was at its best in the four or five noble orations 
which mark the culminating moments of his career ; 
and his first public appearance in the field was as 
the poet of his class on Commencement Day. 

After passing through the regular course of the- 
ological study, he was settled as minister of West 
Cambridge (now Arlington) in 1829. Here, in his 
six years' ministry, he developed by resolute disci- 
pline the mental habit that remained with him 
through life. A sturdy build, and a fibre tenacious 
rather than supple, marked the character of both 
mind and body. Alert and no way sluggish (that 
vice of scholars), he was a vigorous pedestrian till 
near the end of his days, and the strains of endur- 
ance he underwent in his various travelling experi- 



HIS LITERARY HABIT. 77 

ence were such as can rarely befall a man of letters 
in these days. But the daily life was that of a 
laborious student, — which means that he was ca- 
pable of the physical strain of an amount of confine- 
ment to books which few men are equal to. And 
it means too, in his case, a very unusual strain 
of laborious and painstaking literary composition. 
The amount of mechanical labor in preparing for 
the pulpit was greater then than now ; and, while 
exceptionally faithful in this task-work, he wrote 
always slowly and with effort. Quite in contrast 
with the swift and brilliant movement of his emi- 
nent contemporary and friend, Dr. Martineau, who 
in early days made himself master of shorthand, that 
his pen might keep pace with the electric rapidity of 
his thought, every sentence, every line, was traced 
with deliberation, — nay, revised and interlined with 
scrupulous care. There was none of the labor-saving 
that comes with the modern way of dictating to an 
amanuensis or type-writer, none of the slovenly pen- 
manship which is said sometimes to be the cruel affec- 
tation of men of letters. In the hundreds of pages 
of his manuscript that I have read, formal essay or 
familiar epistle, I do not remember ever hesitating 
at a single illegible word or carelessly written let- 
ter : the pages of the autobiographic fragment just 
given are as scrupulously penned as a school-boy's 
composition ; no trembling of the hand, even, is 
discernible, though written far past eighty, in the 
lassitude and dread of threatening infirmity. This 
firmness of fibre, this resolute temper, is strongly 
characteristic both of the scholar and the man. 



78 FEEDEEIC HENEY HEDGE. 

As a set-off to this laborious habit of mind, he 
had the rare gift — which we have never known in 
equal degree except in the case of Edward Everett — 
of mastering with verbal accuracy, by a single read- 
ing, the form and phrase of a long elaborate dis- 
course. The advantage this gave him on the public- 
platform, on formal occasions, has been often felt ; 
and all the more, because (as we may recall of the 
eulogy on Bellows and Emerson a ) it w T as attended 
with so easy a mastery of matter as well as form 
that his mind played freely, in variation of the 
theme, as the point, the phrase, or the illustration 
might suggest itself at the moment. I have never 
understood why he did not avail himself of this 
remarkable power" in the ordinary exercises of the 
pulpit : possibly it involved a grasp and a strain 
that he did not care to put forth too often. But 
among the very last of his public utterances there 
were two occasions — in Providence and in Phila- 
delphia — when, distrusting his eyesight for the 
evening service, after speaking in the usual way in 
the morning, he secured by that forthputting of 
memory the freedom of speech he craved. 

These habits of thought and speech, along with 
the gathering of great treasures of book-lore, w~e may 
suppose to have been the attainment of those six 
years of his first pastoral charge. At the age of 
thirty, with powers ripened to self-reliance, and with 
rare wealth of intellectual resource, he became min- 
ister of the Independent Congregational Church in 

1 These are given, with the author's revision, as an Appendix to 
" Our Liberal Movement." 



BANGOR. — VISITS TO EUROPE. 79 

Bangor, Maine, then a place remote and hard to 
reach, 1 but full of the intelligence, the enterprise, 
the ea^er confidence in a brilliant future, which we 
have been more accustomed since to associate with 
the growth of our Western cities. The fifteen years 
spent here not only served to develop his powers to 
a more vigorous independence of thought and will 
than they might, possibly, have grown to in an older 
community, but were the period when the position 
he has so long held before the public was firmly 
taken and broadly recognized. Among warm friends 
and eager learners in the circle of his local ministry 
there was an ease and joy in the assertion of his own 
ripening thought ; while the special contribution he 
could bring, from the intimate home knowledge he 
had of German, made his most characteristic and 
valuable gift to the larger movement of thought 
that illuminated those days. The first of three later 
visits to Europe for the purpose of study and travel, 
and of by far the deepest influence in shaping his 
riper thought, was in the year 1847. Spending the 
ensuing winter in Borne, he not only became an 
appreciative student of Italian art, thus enriching 
his culture by a vein which most of us are obliged 
to neglect, but was a witness to some of the most 
striking scenes of that strange revolutionary spring- 
time of 1848, including the moment of the passion- 

1 A parishioner of his, whom I knew afterwards, was once he- 
calmed for a week off the headland of Penobscot Bay on the return 
voyage from Boston ; and the overland journey in winter had its 
full share of arctic hardships and perils : he has told me of toiling 
through half the night to help right the stage-coach when upset, or 
keep it from being blockaded in the snow-drifts. 



80 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

ate protest of Pope Pius IX. against the demands of 
the revolutionists : Non voglio, non debbo, non posso ! 
— words which he was fond of quoting as he had 
heard them from those sonorous lips. The delight 
of that one deep draught of the intellectual life of 
Italy, and then of moving with the ease of native 
speech in the scholarly circles of revisited Germany, 
made one of the treasures of a memory ever fresh, 
during the years that followed. 

With his rare intellectual gifts and great wealth 
of literary culture, there was no one farther than he 
from the dilettante spirit which cherishes literature 
or art for its own sake, apart from its higher uses. 
It was his fixed habit of mind to regard those things 
not merely as good and beautiful in themselves, but 
as instruments of service. It was highly character- 
istic of this temper of mind that he disdained the 
clamor, and wholly dissented from the argument, 
that demanded international copyright on the ground 
of property-right, holding in scorn whatever seemed 
to turn into a trade the high vocation of authorship. 
The temper was that of the teacher, the preacher, 
the interpreter of thought or beauty to the higher 
life of men. This vocation was very early rec- 
ognized in him, and it was rewarded in his long 
career with every honor which service like his can 
win. Yet, in the simplicity of his judgment of him- 
self, he always doubted whether he ought not to 
have followed his first inclination to a physician's 
life ; and always regretted that he was born too 
early (as he thought) to be baptized into the newer 
life of Science, instead of that almost purely literary 



MENTAL TEMPER AND RESOURCES. 81 

and philosophic training, in which most persons saw 
the noblest field for the exercise of his powers. 

While he was born to the birthright and full 
enjoyment of companionship hi the most brilliant 
intellectual era of New England, he brought to it a 
gift of his own, which no other man either did or 
could, — the gift (as we might almost term it) of two 
mother-tongues, English and German being about 
equally familiar to him from his school-days. It 
was not alone the literary knowledge of German, in 
which many scholars may have rivalled him ; but 
he learned the tongue as a boy amongst boys, when 
the great day of German literature was still shining 
in its mellow afternoon, while Goethe, whose sun 
was not set, was still the object of that revering 
homage which is never, perhaps, so loyally felt as 
by young disciples to a living Master ; so that not 
only he was quick in later years to resent any dis- 
paragement of that hero of his boyish imagination, 
but in him and in other masters could trace the 
touches of home-feeling, and even here and there 
the reminiscences of school-boy slang, in the diction 
that makes up the marvellous composite of the 
Goethean verse and prose. This atmosphere of 
German thought rather than its form and under- 
standing merely, he had brought home with him 
just at a time when it not only quickened and 
enlarged his own university studies, but could be 
turned to later account, to make flexible and rich 
the somewhat provincial dialect of letters and 
scholarship then prevailing in New England. This, 
rather than any formal teaching of philosophy, — 

6 



82 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

which he disbelieved in and kept aloof from, — 
made his characteristic service to our so-called 
"Transcendental" movement. 

Perhaps the greatest social as well as intellectual 
delight he ever enjoyed was in the companionship 
of that golden age (as we are tempted to call it now) 
when the glory and the dew of youth still lay upon 
many fields of thought which we have since had to 
survey with measuring-rods and to take account of 
in critical judgment and comparison. And those 
companionships were perhaps always the closest and 
most familiar to his thought. None others have 
ever quite taken the place to him of the names of 
Emerson, Furness, and Margaret Fuller. It may he 
that some, even among his own students, have since 
those days found or imagined him difficult of ap- 
proach and slow of sympathy ; and he might find it 
hard to pardon an affront once given to his good 
taste, his self-respect, or his jealous regard for a 
friend. So that it has been often a surprise to find 
how generous, considerate, tender, even humble- 
minded this strong man could be when the magic 
circle was once passed, or when his thought came 
up for judgment and comparison in debate as be- 
tween equals. The writer of these lines has been 
personally indebted to that generous consideration 
in many ways that do not concern the public, and 
has come to know instances of his bounty in giving, 
and thoughtful loving-kindness, which for mere 
justice' sake, and in memory of a friend, and for the 
better understanding of those who did not see that 
side, justify this brief mention here. 



THE GIFT OF MEMORY. 83 

It may be mentioned here that the singular 
vigor and tenacity of memory, before spoken of, 
embraced first and naturally those masses of liter- 
ary task-work which made his conspicuous public 
performance ; but took in with equal ease long 
passages from classic Writers, — particularly from 
the poets, both German and English, who made 
his favorite companions, — and served as a great 
help in the act of composition as well. Eor ex- 
ample, the lines entitled " The Idealist " (first 
published as " Questionings "), one of the longest 
and most striking of his poems and among those 
he regarded as the best, were suggested to his 
thought while watching the stars during a sleep- 
less night in the Bangor mail-coach, and were 
wholly elaborated in memory, to be written down 
on his arrival at home. Others of his verses were 
composed in a similar way. Whatever was metri- 
cal in form, he said, was taken easily into his mem- 
ory and stayed there, For example, referring quite 
incidentally to the early promise and the early loss 
of Edward Emerson, the most brilliantly gifted of 
the three brothers, he quoted at once for illustra- 
tion the pathetic stanzas in which that rare genius 
bade farewell to his native land from the ship that 
bore him out of Boston Harbor upon the voyage 
from which he never returned. Nor were these 
as one might expect, only the familiar handling 
of long-kept hoards ; for once, when I spoke of 
those verses of Matthew Arnold (" Obermann once 
more ") which tell so powerfully the tragedy and 
pathos of that desolation of spirit in ancient Eome 



84 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

which bowed her proud head to the yoke of Orien- 
tal faith, he began, in that deep and mellow tone 
of recitation which his friends will recall so well, 
and without hesitation repeated perhaps a dozen 
of those wonderful stanzas, which (I think) he had 
read only once, but which had so struck and clung 
upon his memory. 

One other quality in him appears to have been 
ripened in these days : it belongs, in part, to that 
which President Walker had in mind when he 
spoke to me of him once as " the only man we 
have who is master of the grand style." This 
phrase might possibly mean only what is ornate 
and orotund in rhetorical composition ; but in this 
case it meant something more. I was first dis- 
tinctly conscious of it in a passage of the " Christian 
Examiner," about 1851, speaking of the effect upon 
the imagination of an experience at sea ; and I 
have since thought that in this one deep resonant 
chord there was a tone not reached by any other 
living master of English prose : we might compare 
it to the music of a bell, which is no one single 
note, like that of a bugle, but is made up of the 
harmonies, peal within peal, which respond to the 
intricate curves, of varying diameter, that make 
the shape and vibrate to the cadence of the bell. 
A few passages in his writings — in no writer are 
there more than a very few — will justify this 
comparison. 

The mind of Dr. Hedge was in like manner sensi- 
tive to what we may call the resonances with which 
the soul or the imagination responds to the utter- 



HIS INTELLECTUAL HABIT. 85 

ance of a thought, — it may be in a poetic image, 
or it may be in a philosophic truth. He would 
never be content with the abstract expression of 
a thing, the one hard formal statement. To his 
mind it must speak in the language of literature 
rather than science. And this had a more far- 
reaching effect upon the substance and range of 
the thought itself than might at first be supposed. 
Thus, for example, he was extraordinarily well 
read in the literature of philosophy, — which we 
may, indeed, qualify by saying that it was mainly 
the literature anterior to the last thirty or forty 
years. But he was extremely distrustful of the 
dogmatism of formal metaphysics. He steadily 
and with increasing emphasis disparaged the syste- 
matizing of Hegel and his disciples. He as con- 
stantly and with increasing satisfaction gave his 
preference to Schelling, whom he regarded as 
having the profounder insight of a seer instead of 
a theorist. What we might still less have ex- 
pected, while his knowledge of G-erman was that 
of a mother tongue, while he read its philosophic 
dialect without even the conscious effort which 
most readers need to assimilate the phrase and 
the thought, it was not his habit to read a treatise 
consecutively, with regard to the logic of its struc- 
ture. Thus he had never read through that com- 
paratively brief and compactly reasoned essay, 
Kant's "Critique," but was familiar only with its 
speculations on Time and Space and with its criti- 
cism of the argument for a speculative Theism ; 
while he might show, incidentally, the pleasure 



86 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

he took in various of Kant's minor essays, which 
are never heard of in histories of philosophy. Then, 
too, it was the poetic and speculative, not the logical 
or didactic, side of natural science that interested 
him ; and he liked it best when in some shape that 
allowed one to treat as open questions its most 
fundamental theories, — even the theory of gravi- 
tation, or the structure of the solar system. With 
much insight and delight in speculative philosophy, 
it was always the literary study of it that delighted 
him most. 

Again, with a great range both of knowledge 
and of sympathy in the field of history, he rather 
preferred views of it which were generalistic, specu- 
lative, and somewhat vague. Writers, like Gibbon, 
of powerful bias, especially such as express their 
conception in literary " good form " and in " the 
grand style," attracted him more than those more 
curiously accurate : history, like philosophy, was 
rather literature than science. Nor, though a 
scholar of admirable equipment, was he in the 
modern sense a trained philologist: his interest in 
philology was that of a curious amateur. His 
large knowledge and facile use of the learned 
tongues, especially Latin, did not lead him, in 
general, to deal with the sources of our historical 
knowledge in the original speech, even in his 
chosen and professional field of ecclesiastical his- 
tory. The thought, the doctrine, the persons of 
the great and eminent men who make the actors 
in that field, he knew well, often with a grasp of 
imagination and memory of facts that made his 



HIS HISTORICAL STUDIES. 87 

knowledge of them singularly vivid, instructive, 
and real. Particular writers, too, lie knew by the 
critical and profound apprehension of their own 
works. Augustine, Anselm, and Eaymond Lully 
may be mentioned among those who thus attracted 
him ; and, of later writers, Spinoza and Leibnitz, 
whom he had studied extensively and patiently 
in their own text. But the great web of history 
is wrought of the lives and thoughts of a multitude 
of lesser men, who should also be judged by touch 
of the hand and look of the eye, — that is, by their 
own word for what they thought and did ; and of 
this knowledge he took less account. I do not 
think, for example, that he knew the Greek Fathers 
(unless the very earliest) except at second hand ; 
and, excepting Scotus Erigena, the Latin ecclesias- 
tical writers of the "lower" period were mostly 
unknown to him. On the other hand, his literary 
apprehension of the great classics, Greek as well 
as Latin, was eager, discriminating, and fresh. 

One who is greatly his inferior in range and 
wealth of the knowledge to be had from books — 
as there is' no one of us but must confess himself 
to be — will take such indications as the above to 
show not the extent or accuracy or value of that 
knowledge in him, but only the particular lines in 
which it ]ay. We take the impression of a large, 
luminous, and richly stored intelligence ; we stand 
towards it in the attitude of learners ; and we are 
aware of the powerful influence that comes to us 
from that mental touch. When, further, we look 
to see the form of the channel through which it 



88 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

comes, we are at once struck by noticing how much 
is instruction and discipline, how little is mere 
didactics : to use the familiar distinction, how little 
in comparison is the " literature of knowledge," how 
much the " literature of power." Now power tells 
best in a series of waves, or blows, — not like the 
tug of a chain, which is no stronger than its weak- 
est link. It will be found that the delivery of 
Dr. Hedge's argument — take, for example, his best- 
known work, " Eeason in Eeligion " — was in a 
series of discourses, each rounded and complete in 
itself, which developed a single order of thought 
with culminating effect, but with little of logical 
coherence. There was a felicity of phrase, but ab- 
solute injustice of thought, in the criticism which 
once spoke of these discourses as a garland of 
plucked flowers tied together with a string, not a 
living plant that yields them by vital force : the 
live thought connecting them runs underground, 
like the root of " Solomon's seal," sending up its 
shoots independent of one another, and is invisible 
to those who do not look below the surface. But, 
it may be contended, the argument is all the more 
readily grasped, and so all the more effective, be- 
cause delivered in this form. And the book just 
named has doubtless had far more influence in our 
own later thinking than any other of its time and 
class. 

Quite in keeping with the mould in which he 
thus cast his argument, Dr. Hedge felt a certain 
impatience and disdain of that intellectual method 
which affects logical completeness, and tries to for- 



HIS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 89 

mulate all modes of being in a coherent system. 
From his own mind he seems distinctly to have 
excluded anything that could be called a theory 
of the universe. He was equally offended on the 
one hand by the argument for Final Causes, which 
he thought to have been effectually discredited in 
Kant's " Critique," and by modern theories of Evolu- 
tion, which seemed to him a baseless dogmatism, 
and which he never attempted really to understand. 
Probably that conception of the universe would have 
pleased him best which took into account only the 
order of Ideas exhibited in it ; and if he had for- 
mulated it at all, it would have been in a more or 
less qualified Berkleyanism. What was not in the 
Divine order of Ideas touched neither his philoso- 
phy nor his religion. If he tended more and more, 
in later life, to a way of thinking that refused to 
regard the Eternal God as the Creator of material 
things, and set up an illogical Dualism over against 
our traditional Theism, it was, I think, more from a 
moral than from an intellectual motive : he would 
not make the Holy One responsible for the woe and 
wickedness we see ; he would at least reserve a 
sanctuary of worship for the soul, undisturbed by 
the jarring and painful argument that ever seeks 
and ever fails to reconcile the facts of daily life with 
the conception the mind loves to frame of a purely 
benevolent Creator. 

And it may be held, further, that his mental tem- 
perament — poetic, sensitive, and sympathetic rather 
than severely logical — made it all the harder to 
accept the optimism which consoles the average 



90 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

religious mind. He would admire without heartily 
accepting the clear and brilliant argumentation of 
that masterpiece of forensic divinity, Martineau's 
"Study of Eeligion;" and, while he was morally 
repelled, he was intellectually fascinated — more, 
perhaps, than he would readily admit to himself — 
by Schopenhauer's interpretation of the more som- 
bre facts of life. At any rate, he kept his religion 
and his cosmology quite apart, excepting so far as 
he might indulge in speculation or poetic meditation 
upon the latter. In the constant mood of his in- 
ward life he was a reverent, submissive, and humble 
worshipper of the Living God ; while he refused to 
lift with daring hand the veil that hides the mys- 
tery of the Eternal, and repudiated the pious logic 
by which many have thought to bolster up their 
faith. 

Just what effect this habit of thought had on his 
doctrinal belief, it would be hard and not quite 
safe to say. In his own expression of it he was 
true to the Emersonian maxim, to see and say the 
one thing, honestly and plainly, as it reveals itself 
to the mind in its best moods, and let the matter 
of logical consistency shift for itself. Eeverent and 
submissive in his own acceptance of the discipline 
of life, and asserting with whatever fulness of mean- 
ing it could bear to him the sublime and comforting 
faith of the soul's eternal life, he yet has given 
public expression 2 to an exposition of that faith 

1 See "Atheism in Philosophy/' p. 388, and the essay on " Per- 
sonality " in the volume entitled " Luther and Other Essays/* 
pp. 286-288. 



HIS EELIGIOUS FAITH. 91 

which seems to deny outright the survival of man's 
personal consciousness beyond, the present sphere. 
That this was no mere phase of philosophic specu- 
lation he showed, further, by his repeated assertion 
that memory and consciousness are " functions of 
the brain," which cannot be conceived to survive its 
dissolution ; nay, by the solace he found in insist- 
ing upon this view at a time of great suffering and 
depression, when " to drag the lengthening chain 
of memory " into perpetual duration seemed to him 
the most dreadful of anticipations, and absolute 
repose was the only boon he craved. To which it 
is only to be added that the Eternal Life itself, with 
whatever it may imply for the serenity and support 
of the individual soul, was to him the most vivid 
of realities, and that, religiously as well as men- 
tally, he walked always in those "ways of the 
Spirit" which it was ever the burden weighing 
upon his thought to interpret fitly to other men. 

A friend who was privileged to be much in 
communication with him in his last years writes as 
follows : — 

"In the early months of this year [1887] he was for 
many weeks afflicted with a most depressing (eczema- 
tous) complaint, as to which I have often thought 
since that its torment exceeded many times over that 
of martyrdom by slow fire, as in the case of Servetus : 
indeed, the memory of it is, I think, to be traced in 
the tone of some of his writings since, for example in 
the article on < Nature, a Problem/ in the ' Unita- 
rian Review ' of March, 1888. During this time of 
suffering his frequent and almost passionately ex- 



92 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

pressed wish was only for absolute forgetfulness and 
rest. It happened once that, when I had not seen him 
for two or three weeks, he sent for me to his bedside, 
and spoke to me nearly in these words : ' I wished to 
see you at this time. When I recover from this sick- 
ness, if I do recover, you will see another man, and 
you will not know your friend. I shall have lost my 
memory ; I shall be afflicted with a troublesome 
aphasia ; and I shall not be able to say what I wish 
to say now,' — going on, with strong assurance of 
affection and of gratitude for the service he conceived 
me to have rendered, to give the few instructions 
which I was to observe. I assured him (as I very 
sincerely could) that I thought his fear quite ground- 
less : I had watched carefully, and had observed that 
(allowing for the languor due to his malady) his 
thought was always precise and clear, and the right 
word was always chosen. I left him, I think, partly 
reassured ; and indeed, as soon as the crisis was past, 
he not only rallied surprisingly fast, but his conversa- 
tion was never more fluent and clear, or his memory of 
the past held in easier grasp, than in the months that 
followed." 

This testimony, it is true, needs to be qualified 
by adding that something — not much — of the 
difficulty he dreaded did in fact occur. It was 
most marked by the inability of sustained literary 
effort ; the old habit and desire remained, but after 
a few paragraphs or pages the pen absolutely re- 
fused its task, — "by a sort of fate," as he expressed 
it. Thus the publication of Emerson's memoir was 
the occasion of a long series of delightful remi- 
niscences ; but to the hope that these might be 



HIS LAST YEAKS. 93 

wrought into such a picture and judgment of his 
life-long friend as other friends would love to keep, 
he could only reply by pleading the utter impossi- 
bility of the task. And while his talk (which we 
would test sometimes in that way) ranged as freely 
as ever through the wide fields of history, litera- 
ture, and philosophy that had been familiar to him, 
there would come the check — oftener as time went 
on — of being unable to recall the name of the 
person or the place : Bayle, Leibnitz, and Newton 
— Paris, Genoa, the Eiviera — occur among the 
names that had to be supplied to fill the blank. 
But he held with a jealous tenacity to what re- 
mained of his wonderful verbal memory, and among 
the last efforts by which he strove to keep his 
grasp of conscious intelligence was the silent repe- 
tition to himself of passages, even at some length, 
from German poets, which had been among the 
most cherished treasures of his great intellectual 
wealth. 

A mind so individual, and so far apart from the 
conventional beliefs of Christendom, was slow in 
finding wide popular recognition, and long failed of 
its proper weight among those of its generation. 
That his power was felt in his circle of immediate 
influence was a thing of course : his word was 
always " weighty and powerful," — the more, be- 
cause much of what he said, and often the best of 
what he said, had to do not with matters of specu- 
lation, but with every-day ethics, the personal ex- 
perience of religion, and the successive crises of our 
public life. Bat it was when he was already more 



94 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

than fifty, and his name came up in connection with 
a certain academic appointment he was understood 
to desire, that Dr. Putnam (then in authority in 
the university) spoke to me of the contrast there 
was between the honor in which Dr. Hedge was 
held among those of his own profession and the 
ignorance of him in the general public. This lack 
of general appreciation afterwards changed very 
fast to vague respect and then to better knowledge; 
and for full thirty years he has been everywhere 
fully recognized as without a peer in the com- 
munion to which he loyally belonged from first to 
last, certainly without a superior among the intel- 
lectual leaders of our country. 

This change in his attitude towards the large 
world of those more remotely interested in philoso- 
phy and letters had to do, it is likely, with his 
removal from Bangor to Providence, in 1850 ; and 
again with his removal from Providence to Brook- 
line, in 1857. Here he was in what he probably 
felt to be his proper place, as one of the immediate 
Boston circle ; and, besides, it was now that, by 
persuasion of his near connection, Eev. Thomas B. 
Fox, he took editorial charge, for a few years, of 
the " Christian Examiner," and so opened new chan- 
nels of communication with that wider world. At 
this date, too, he accepted the charge of the depart- 
ment of Ecclesiastical History in the Harvard Di- 
vinity School, which he held for twenty-one years, 
receiving meanwhile, in 1872, the appointment of 
Professor of German Literature in the University, 
which he held till 1881. 



HIS WRITINGS AND INFLUENCE. 95 

The last forty years of his life were thus spent in 
full view and in close relations with that larger 
intellectual public to which he always felt so strong 
attraction. It was also the period of his greatest 
activity and influence as a writer. The series of 
volumes already cited — "Eeason in Eeligion" 
(1865), "Ways of the Spirit"' (1877), "Atheism in 
Philosophy" (1884), and "Luther" (1888), together 
with " The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition " 
(1869), and a thin volume of translations and origi- 
nal poems — have been the waymarks of this later 
career. They are the proper subject of literary crit- 
icism, which I do not propose to combine with this 
personal memorial; and his place in the future 
development of our .religious thought will turn upon 
the judgment that shall be formed upon them. To 
me it simply happens that for just one third of a 
century I was thrown into near personal relations 
with the man, sometimes as helper and sometimes 
as successor in his work, — sometimes, too, in a very 
close and confidential way, — and this seems to lay 
upon me the charge not of critic, but of interpreter 
in part: to help, if I may, by such knowledge of 
him as I have been able to gain through personal 
communication, in the right understanding of the 
lesson which he has left to the world. The lesson, 
truly interpreted, is that which we find in the char- 
acter, the spiritual endowment, and the mental 
habit of the man. How these had their roots in the 
antecedents and their growth in the earlier stages of 
his career, it has been my attempt to show. And 
with this key it is my hope that the work of his 



96 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 

pen and hand — which with every gifted and original 
mind is a sort of hieroglyph, needing that clew to its 
proper reading — may be the better understood. I 
am sure that the man himself will receive his full 
meed of loving honor. 



V. 

SOME YOUNGEE MEMOEIES. 

BEFOKE closing this record, which is so largely 
made up of personal recollections and im- 
pressions, it seems fitting to include in it the names 
of a few whose history belongs to a later day, most 
of whom were my own contemporaries and com- 
panions. In the tender words of Henry Vaughan, 
" they are all gone into the world of light," and 
remain our examples of the " holy hope and high 
humility," which belong to the ideal of life we 
cherished together. What I would recall of them 
is not anything that would make the faintest out- 
line of a biography or hint of criticism, but only 
some touch or memory, not elsewhere recorded, 
which in justice to them I would not willingly let 
die. 

First, however, two or three names occur, mark- 
ing the transition from the time I have been chiefly 
dealing with to that which is properly of my own 
generation. The impression one gets from the com- 
panionship, in later life, of those old enough to have 
been once looked up to as his teachers and guides 
is the one I wish here very briefly to recall. This 
impression some of us have had in the memory of 
a well-marked group of men, examples of a special 

7 



98 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

form of idealism more familiar once than now, who 
made, as it were, a " bridge of light " that brought 
over the finest faith of an older generation into the 
new intellectual conditions by which we found our- 
selves surrounded ; whose generous interpretation 
of that faith saved many a mind from the sterile 
doubt which a period of rationalizing criticism 
might else have carried with it. 

It was something, in that day, to be a herald and 
interpreter of the new light that (to the deep mis- 
giving of some of our best teachers) was breaking 
over upon us out of Germany, — to be a loving 
expositor of Schleiermacher and Goethe, and at the 
same time to keep all the pure single-heartedness 
of " the faith which was once delivered to the 
saints," through such apostles as Freeman and 
Channing. This service James Freeman Clarke, 
more perhaps than any single man, has done for us ; 
but in doing it he was one of a goodly company. 
It seems as if no one who had not felt in its prime 
the glow of that quickening movement of the 
Spirit could quite know how much that group of 
men have been to those who came a little after 
them. It happened that I was in California when 
the death of William Henry Channing had just 
left Dr. Clarke the sole survivor of that group ; and 
I was moved to express to him by letter my sense 
of this peculiar debt. His reply was as follows : — 

" I received your very kind letter, and it gave me 
very great pleasure. Your description of the interest 
in the group of which Theodore Parker, William 
Henry Channing, James H. Perkins, George Ripley, 



JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. 99 

and others were members, and with which I also had 
the pleasure of being associated, was peculiarly pleas- 
ing and touched me nearly. How strange are the 
influences which act on us ! There was our poor little 
' Western Messenger/ which found you out in North- 
borough, and found our dear brother Conant in 
Chicago, and in which we pnt the best life we had- 
How well James H. Perkins wrote ! When it was 
printed in Louisville, I had to be publisher, editor, 
contributor, proof-reader, and boy to pack up the 
copies and carry them to the post-office. But I en- 
joyed it. And you read ' Theodore ' too, and went 
to Amory Hall ! I have scarcely ever heard of any 
one's reading ' Theodore,' but, if you liked it, perhaps 
others also liked it. Every man who writes a book 
or preaches a sermon casts his bread on the waters, 
happy if he finds it again after many days. It was 
very kind of you to write to me as you have done, 
and your kindly appreciation of some of my past 
efforts warms my heart. We do not care for praise- 
as we grow old, but we always are made happy by 
sympathy. 

' Common as light is love, 
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.'" 

While of Dr. Clarke's many and choice gifts the 
greatest was charity, — which we may here interpret 
as that fine and rare quality which drew men to him 
in confiding sympathy, — he could be valiant for 
the right with a courage as invincible and obstinate 
as any champion of the sword. I remember a 
strange scene in Faneuil Hall in 1847, when, with- 
out hesitation as without effect, he pressed his 
word of " sweet reasonableness " upon a stormy 



100 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

crowd, — when the hall fairly glistened with the 
shining caps of a valiant crew mustered in for the 
war with Mexico. One can point to at least three 
distinct issues in these later years of political note, 
in which that serene conviction of duty, backed by 
no little hardihood of temper, left a definite mark 
upon the event, the chief of them being his defence 
of independent politics in the convention at Worces- 
ter. But in general he has left the impression of 
one averse to contention and the strife of tongues. 
No one that we can anywhere recall has led the 
intellectual life in an atmosphere quite so radiant 
with the gladness and affection of a great host of 
friends ; no apostle of the Word, whom we can 
readily name, has sent forth that word so penetrat- 
ing and so broadly into the hearts of those waiting 
to be delivered from bondage to error and fear, who 
received it in the spirit of glad confidence which 
was so eminently the spirit of his gospel. 

It is now a great while ago ■ — in fact, some years 
more than sixty — that I remember hearing read, in 
my father's vestry, a little tract which may be 
called the first sounding of the key-note of Unitarian 
missions in the West. It was in the form of a 
letter written from Ephraim Peabody (then in 
Cincinnati) to George Putnam. I believe it was 
the same tract which keenly interested William G. 
Eliot, then completing his course in the Cambridge 
Divinity School. As I heard the account from his 
mother (who was, long after, a member of my 
congregation in Washington), he resolved at once, 



WILLIAM GKEENLEAF ELIOT. 101 

with the tenacity of purpose characteristic of him, 
that the West should be his field ; and it was not 
a call from without, or an invitation in any sense, 
but a study of the map of the United States, that 
first made him, in that early day of tedious and 
difficult travel, fix on a place so remote and un- 
promising as St. Louis. His friends were grieved 
and disappointed at this resolve, for he was very 
dear to them ; and they had fond hopes of a Boston 
settlement, which would have kept him nearer, and 
given what seemed a more brilliant opportunity. 
Finding him inflexible, his father at length said to 
him : " Go where you think it is right. I will find 
you in clothes, and where you go, no doubt, you 
will have food and lodging ; and God be with you, 
my son." At the beginning he found an audience 
of thirty, — at best, perhaps twice as many. At 
the end of six months he had a congregation of 
nine, but, of these, seven were resolved to stand by 
him ; and by the end of the year they were in- 
creased to two hundred. The result makes perhaps 
the most eventful chapter in our denominational 
history. When once, during the war, a brother of 
mine, visiting St. Louis on business of the Sanitary 
Commission, said to a friend, " I suppose that Dr. 
Eliot has done as much as any man to save Missouri 
to the Union and make it a free State," the reply 
was instant and prompt : " As much as any man ? 
Dr. Eliot has done ten times more for that than 
any other ten men put together ! " 

There was a time — in 1847, I think — when it 
was proposed and voted to invite Dr. Eliot to serve 



102 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

as Secretary of the American Unitarian Association. 
Antislavery feeling at this time ran high ; the 
action of religious bodies was jealously watched, 
and the Association was at once sharply attacked 
for putting its confidence in a man supposed to 
have some complicity with slavery, — nay, charged 
with being himself a slaveholder. The true story 
shows how cruel and unjust such charges sometimes 
were. For it appears, from the account his mother 
gave to me, that a certain gentleman, to whom he 
was under obligation for much kindness, had lived 
for a time in his family, bringing a servant-woman, 
— a slave, — to whom the family became much 
attached. Afterwards it happened that the gentle- 
man failed in business ; and, under the cruel law 
of slavery, the woman was liable to be seized for 
his debt, and sold to the Southern market. Full of 
distress, she appealed to Mr. Eliot, who paid out of 
his own means the price of her ransom, never took 
a title-deed or was her legal owner, — unless it 
might be technically, till her free papers could be 
made out, — and simply accepted her verbal assur- 
ance that her wages would go towards the payment 
of the sum advanced. Only a small part of this 
was ever in fact repaid ; for when, some time after, 
Mr. Eliot took a journey to Europe, he cancelled the 
debt, giving her a small house and a cow, and she 
lived thenceforth in comfort and independence. 
Such is the true story of his " slaveholding." 

And who is there that can possibly make a 
younger generation understand what the name of 



THOMAS STARR KING. 103 

Thomas Starr King means to those who knew and 
loved him ? A noble memorial statue in San 
Francisco ; the well-known story of General Scott, 
who said he had heard that California was saved 
to the Union by " a young man of the name of 
King ; " two small volumes, without the light of 
those eyes to read them by, — these are all, or nearly 
all, that the general public can ever know of him. 
Yet to us his presence and his loss seem so near ! 
Many are the recollections cherished of that young 
life, which ought to have a far more full presenting 
than was given by his friend Mr. Whipple as an 
introduction to the volume of his Discourses : the 
letters, in particular, of which none are preserved 
there, would give a far more living picture of that 
bright and versatile intelligence than any more 
formal composition. But who is there to prevent 
such memorials from fading into the dimness of an 
unregistered tradition ? In his brief public career, 
and in the charm of friendly intercourse, he seemed 
all transparent and open as daylight to whoever 
would come and hear, as if there were no shadow 
behind that beaming and winning personality : the 
luminous eye, the noble quality of voice, a certain 
eager gayety of temper, quick wit and humor, an 
intelligence to which the term " lucid " as well as 
wide, swift, and vigorous belonged more absolutely 
than to any other I have ever known, drew men to 
him as to a friend whom not only they would in- 
evitably love, but might easily read through and 
through. But a correspondence with him early 
in the fifties contained one letter (lent, alas, and 



104 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

lost) which threw a deeper light on his earlier 
life than anything that yet survives. And there 
were hints and confessions from his lips in conver- 
sation, — not, surely, of anything that stained the 
crystal purity of his life, hut which showed a vein 
that appealed to one's sympathy in quite another 
way than the public could ever know. In particu- 
lar, he lamented a certain " coldness " of temper- 
ament which no one could ever suspect under the 
charm of that genial companionship. Dr. Hale 
has told of his distrust of his own ability to speak 
out, spontaneously, such words as flow from heart 
to heart. I happened myself to know (being just 
then his guest) that what seemed, on a public occa- 
sion, to be an easy flow of unpremeditated wit was 
anxiously studied and put together in the spare 
minutes of a very busy week. The natural gener- 
osity of his temper towards certain matters of 
public right was cramped by a fastidious critical 
sense that shut off his sympathy with some popular 
moral movements of his day, and made the ruder 
methods of many "reformers" strongly repugnant 
to him; and the full wealth and strength of his 
nature, we may well believe, would never have 
shown itself, but for the magnificent opportunity 
of those last four years, — when the cause was 
that of national unity as well as personal liberty ; 
when for once he threw himself upon the tide 
of a noble passion without any misgiving or with- 
holding. I copy here from a letter of this later 
period, written in San Francisco in February, 
1862: — 



THOMAS STAKE KING. 105 

"I am tolerably well, and intolerably at work. 
Never wrote so much, in a year as during the last 
year, and am speaking as much as my feeble voice 
will permit. Among my recent activities have been 
nine lecture-sermons on the Book of Job. They were 
received so well that I am repeating them. So you 
see that we are not utterly barbarous here. Some 
chapters of [a recent book] stirred me so much that 
I wrote a lecture on ' Secession in Palestine and its 
Consequences/ which I delivered twice to crammed 
houses in our church and two or three times else- 
where. I am to stay a year or two longer from the 
dear East and precious Boston. Then I want to see 
Europe, — perhaps shall have earned the right to see 
it. . . . We are rejoicing just now over victories [Port 
Eoyal, etc.]. I arranged a great exultation in church, 
last Sunday, in which the music was glorious. And 
such a jam! But I fear the diplomatists. Traitors 
we can beat, but the traders ! Yet let us hope that 
God has a purpose of winding his anaconda around 
the South, which won't be prevailed on to let go." 

And again, from a letter written to Dr. Hedge a 
little more than six weeks before the writer's death 
(Jan. 12, 1864) : — 

" San Francisco is trying to do her duty again on 
the Sanitary subscription. We shall send $200,000 
this year, and I am now arranging circulars and plans 
to secure $ 100,000 from the interior of the State. 
Perhaps I shall have to take the stump to secure it. 
But my church duties are now very heavy, and my 
strength begins to totter. I should like to give the 
new church, with its grand congregation and ample 
treasury, into the keeping of a new voice and spirit. 



106 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

I have no carnal pride in it whatever, but a sincere 
longing to go into quiet and seclusion. The moment 
the war is over, I shall run like a mole for a burrow 
— perhaps Burroughs Place again." 

From a letter of earlier date (1851), I copy this 
illustration of the conservative temper of those 
days : — 

" Perhaps you have seen in the papers that I de- 
livered a Fourth of July address before [a certain 
New England town]. I have heard of ' Hunkers ' 
and ' Union men,' but never saw the genuine article 
till I made acquaintance with the leading citizens of 

. They were determined, they told me, to have 

no one as an orator at all tinctured with Free-soilism ; 
and after trying in vain to get either Choate, Gushing, 
Frank Pierce, or B. F. Hallet, telegraphed to me, 
relying on the newspaper reports of the Artillery 
sermon that I was ' national ' and true blue. I was 
in what Charles Francis Adams calls 'the tight 
pinch,' but succeeded in satisfying all but two or 
three of them in the address, and those took excep- 
tion to some remarks which implied that the institu- 
tions of the South were not so consistent with the 
American idea as those of the North. I was de- 
fended by others of the committee on the ground that 
my language ivas misunderstood and that I could not 
have meant so ! " 

He said once, pleasantly, that in the new Cali- 
f ornian creed " we are no second-adventists ; we 
believe in no ' thousand years,' but in thousands a 
year." But no one, surely, was more generous of 
his own means, or more faithful in urging the re- 
sponsibility of those who had greater. I insert 



THOMAS STARR KING. 107 

here, by request of a friend, a characteristic bit of 
a practical discourse of his on " The Christian 
Dollar": — 

" We say it is the duty of every man, with any 
means, to observe proportion in his surplus ex- 
penses; to have a conscientious order with regard to 
the service which his superfluous dollars discharge. 
Over against every prominent allowance for a per- 
sonal luxury, the celestial record book ought to show 
some entry in favor of the cause of goodness and 
suffering humanity; for every guinea that goes into 
a theatre, a museum, an athenaeum, or the treasury 
of a music hall, there ought to be some twin-guinea 
pledged for a truth, or flying on some errand of 
mercy in a city so crowded with misery as this. 
Then we have a right to our amusements and our 
grateful pleasures. Otherwise we have no right to 
them, but are liable every moment to impeachment 
in the court of righteousness and charity for our 
treachery to heaven and our race." 

Some j^ears ago I had a conversation with our 
old friend, Mr. Oliver Steele, of Buffalo, who told, 
me some facts that seem to me very interesting 
about Starr King's parentage, — he having been a 
member of his father's congregation when preaching 
as a Universalist minister in Connecticut. Mr. 
King, the father, was born in New York City, and 
it was through his mother that the son inherited 
the strain of Irish blood which I had been told of 
in accounting for his remarkable vivacity of mind 
and wit : the father, I have heard, was even a more 
brilliant talker and story-teller than the son. He 



108 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

had been educated as a mechanic, — I forget in 
what trade, — and had gained a certain fame among 
his fellows as a ready and eloquent speaker in their 
trade meetings. It was customary for the New 
York trades, in turn, to elect an orator — generally 
a lawyer, preacher, or politician of local fame — to 
give an annual address before their united societies ; 
and when the turn of his own came, proud of their 
fellow-craftsman, they broke the precedent by ap- 
pointing him speaker of the year. His address 
made such an impression that he was soon per- 
suaded to lay down the tools of his craft and take 
the post of preacher, which he filled with , eminent 
success in New York, Portsmouth, and Charles- 
town, till his death about the age of forty. Starr 
King had said more than once that he never ex- 
pected to outlive his father's age : the horizon, up 
to seventy or eighty, looked very far and dim to 
him. In fact, he died early in his fortieth year. 

John Weiss, too, was a man whom one should 
have known in person to know at all as he was, — 
his gayety and invincible wit, and the singular dash 
of humor with a pathetic something that was partly 
ill-health and partly a certain reckless disregard of 
self, along with his busy, immense, yet largely 
fruitless industry (for masses of fact laboriously 
gathered in his commonplace-book seemed never to 
find a use), and the eccentricity of style and temper 
that handicapped his real genius. All these are 
matters of keen personal impression, and need to 
be dealt with — as they have been — by one (0. B. 



JOHN WEISS. 109 

Frothingham) with whom they made part of a near 
and affectionate memory of the man. 

He was three years before me in college, His 
father, I have understood, was a barber in the town 
of Worcester, a German by blood and by race a 
Jew, — to which last I have sometimes ascribed the 
singular fervor of his religious genius. The first I 
ever saw of him was in the college yard, where he 
had a sort of ovation from his classmates on his 
return from a few months' rustication, and frolicked 
like a child among them. To everybody's surprise 
who knew his quaint levity and drollery, he joined 
our class in the Divinity School, spending a year of 
the course in Germany. Meeting him from time 
to time in the " Hook-and-Ladder," and having after- 
wards some special links of communication with 
him while he was in New Bedford, I have felt per- 
sonally nearer to him than any degree of mental 
sympathy I could claim might seem to warrant. 
Having at one time something to do with the 
" Christian Examiner," I succeeded in getting from 
him one or two papers which I greatly valued. 
But he was always eccentric, kicking out of the 
traces, and enveloping his brilliant parts more and 
more in a thicket of sparkling rhetoric ; hampered by 
ill health and personal anxieties ; but having, with 
a certain carelessness of appreciation and success, 
a winning sweetness and humility at bottom, that 
made everybody fond of him. I tried once to get 
him to work out a sketch of Jesus " the Galilean," 
such as he had given the hint of in conversation, 
and might have developed with great vigor if he 



110 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

had chosen ; but he appears never to have put his 
hand to it. He said, with much emphasis, that the 
popular theory of Jesus, his mildness and serenity 
and so on, was thoroughly mistaken : he was a man, 
on the other hand, of deep and powerful nature, 
capable of strong passion and high political enthu- 
siasm ; his most characteristic sayings were not the 
Beatitudes and moral precepts, but rather his hot 
denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees. But of this, 
and of many another judgment daringly unconven- 
tional, his full word was never spoken. 

The mind of one so spontaneous and versatile is 
best read in his unstudied correspondence ; and I 
will fill out the hints already given, by transcribing 
at some length from letters which revive, by some 
characteristic touches, the interests and discussions 
of those days : — 

New Bedford, January 29, 1849. 

All thoughts of correspondence were interrupted 
by a fire, of which perhaps you have heard ; and now 
I am plunged in the lassitude consequent upon the 
material and mental dilapidations of the past three 
weeks, including the rehabilitation of another dwelling. 
But, upon opening my ill-used secretary again, I find 
your epistle, which was good enough to have deserved 
an earlier answer. So, in spite of a sort of general 
apathy, which has seized me in consequence of late 
excitements, I '11 acknowledge said letter at the least. 
Were you ever burnt out (I doubt not the Spirit has 
flamed over your prairie, and that you have been 
tried " as by fire," but) burnt out physically, and 
left with two or three hundred wrecks of books, to 



JOHN WEISS. Ill 

say nothing of a general reduction of your valuables ? 
It is astonishing how much can be perpetrated in 
a kindly way in twenty minutes. Even a regular 
rebellion in 1834, conducted Avith damage as its final 
cause, was not more destructive. Engines suddenly 
decant the contents of three or four neighboring 
cloacas in your rooms, and the fire retires in disgust 
at seeing the dirty work. The warm-hearted fellow 
would have made clean work. 

Such, then, is our latest noticeable circumstance; 
and I can fairly set down a new sensation as having 
been experienced. Note, too, that one of the chil- 
dren of light was wise enough to have his library 
insured, also furniture and wearing apparel. Who 
shall say, after that policy, that I am of the impracti- 
cables ? But you would like to know what is going 
on ; and here one is embarrassed, for there is very 
little to communicate. The gold fever rages fiercely 
in this city, and it is supposed that from four to five 
hundred stalwart men will emigrate. They all belong 
to the better class in this community, respectable 
mechanics and clerks. Its effect upon the whale- 
fishery is at present bad. Vessels can fit out here 
and carry passengers ; but the place produces noth- 
ing to export. All freight for California is collected 
from other quarters. At the least, the whaling 
will languish for a couple of years, with little but 
passenger money to supply its place ; and if they 
should commence whaling from San Francisco, 
it would materially damage this city. If there is 
a bubble and it bursts, why, then all speculation col- 
lapses also. But is it not a great way of founding 
a new State and of excluding slave-labor ? and was 
not the year 1848 mirabilis ? 



112 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

Emerson came down here, and gave the pleasantest, 
most genial, most natural and generous lecture that 
I have heard from him, on the English. The appre- 
hensive New England Platonist magnified discrimi- 
natingly his beef-eating and sensible, worldly mother. 
What an eye he has, after all, for national character- 
istics ! You know they say that all his geese are 
swans ; but, allowing for a faint tint of rose caught 
from the hot-house hospitality which received him, 
he gave them no more than their due, and it was 
refreshing to hear the fulgid mystic, " who is one 
slope from head to foot," talking about these men 
who " clinch every nail they drive," and who pursue 
Professor Bronson's method of abdominal speaking. 
Excuse the slender material of this letter, but ac- 
cept the intention of acknowledging your favor and 
asking for more. 

May 28, 1849. 

Do you think that we up here read much, and 
settle all questions ? Eond delusion ! We proceed 
in the old way, and do not startle each other with 
great discoveries. We might as well read iEschylus 
and Peirce as for anything that we do to set forward 
Christianity another peg. I doubt whether even the 
Hook-and-Ladder divulges anything. They may look 
very busy and mysterious, but they have nothing to 
divulge. Something has kept me from their meetings 
for the last three or four times, so that my judgment 
is to be taken as merely that of an outsider, who has 
observed nothing uncommon in the atmosphere, and 
heard no explosion. Nor will the tracts of William 
B. Greene help the matter. They are smart, but do 
not increase the planet's velocity. One upon Trans- 



JOHN WEISS. 113 

cendentalism contains errors. But he must write 
and publish. Be assured, however, that he will not 
reinforce the total impression made upon your mind 
by iEschylus and Benny Peirce. He is great at at- 
tacking superannuated orthodox ministers up in Wor- 
cester County. By a smart and sudden dig in the pit 
of the stomach, he deprives the inoffensive men of 
wind, so that one hears no answers. Greene is emi- 
nently useful in this line. If any light is really 
thrown on the history of Christian speculation by 
the "Antiquities of Egypt," it has not yet fallen upon 
your correspondent, who is thus compelled to leave 
you in the dark, merely saying that Bunsen's book, 
from which something may be expected on that point, 

is not yet completed. Neither does 's theory 

appear to have modified the current speculation ; and 
it can hardly be considered as a transmittendum (ex- 
cept as supine in (h)urri), since it is still confined to 
himself. The a-priori autobiography is by our friend 
who knocks the wind out of dying ministers after 
the manner of Mexican nurses, and doubtless with 
the same humane intention of putting them out of 
pain. Part of it was read to the Hook-and-Ladder, 
and created inextinguishable peals of laughter, which 
he bore so genially that I thought there was some- 
thing in his essay. Each one can judge for himself. 
The introduction seems to be a brisk flirtation with 
Pythagoras and the science (?) of numbers. The 
autobiography purported to be a genuine experience 
of Greene's in Florida, and as such is valuable. . . . 
Parker does not yet forget his wrongs. That is the 
worst thing I know about him. He flourishes and 
has influence ; but he begins to complain of his head 
again. He works too hard. There is no controversy 

8 



114 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

with him now ; but the Boston Association does not 
yet fraternize with him, and the whole matter is in 
abeyance. The Massachusetts Quarterly ought to 
do what you say, and I am confident that it will come 
out right. Eipley is reviewing Bushnell. The Ex- 
aminer will remain about so-so. Parker skims those 
blue foreign pamphlets, but what he does with the 
cream is not known to me. I have not seen one for 
a year or two. 

By far the most labored work of Weiss 's hand was 
the Life of Theodore Parker, with copious editing of 
his correspondence. This was a task which he 
sought and eagerly undertook as a labor of love, 
with abundance of generous appreciation of the 
subject, but with the drawback of too little near 
personal acquaintance. As a record of Parker's 
religious life, especially by the free use made of his 
diary and correspondence, it is incomparably rich, 
and, in spite of Mr. Erothingham's admirable biog- 
raphy, it remains as the best source of our acquaint- 
ance with the man. Those who knew Weiss inti- 
mately, and had a key to the dialect in which he 
wrote, were hardly sensible (as it proved) of some 
things in that book which gave needless prejudice 
and pain to many excellent persons. It happened, 
too, that certain material was held back, for personal 
reasons or in hope of some completer future record, 
so that on one side the book was left defective, — 
Parker's relations with Emerson, for example. But, 
on the other hand, where no sensitive nerve was 
touched, it was a great delight to see that eager and 
strong intelligence, colored and heated by so much 



JOHN WEISS. — F. N". KNAPP. 115 

of fervid passion, as interpreted by the fine, keen, 
and ardent genius of the biographer. And some 
single chapters in that book restore to us better than 
anything else we know the very form and pressure 
of the time it dealt with. 

One thinks of Weiss's as a pathetically truncated 
career, when compared with the wealth of his gifts 
and the brightness of his promise. This impression 
comes partly, no doubt, from the circumstance that 
his sensitive and restless individualism took him 
away, in the latter years of his life, more and more 
from the associations and companionships he started 
with ; and so the impression may be a fallacious 
one. Certainly, he was very impatient of the move- 
ment towards a more effective organizing of the 
Unitarian forces in the years just following the war ; 
and, as soon as the " Radical " was started, he replied 
to the kindly words of Dr. Bellows and others, that 
his loyalty was due to that other, not to our older 
organs of thought. He felt himself in his last years 
to be more of a stranger among us than he need to 
have done, and said to one of our younger free- 
thinkers once, half sadly, that he himself, and a few 
others, had paid the price of that liberty in think- 
ing which the later generation have enjoyed. 

Frederick Newman Knapp, a cousin of Dr. Bel- 
lows, and to many others a very dear friend and 
beloved brother, was taken out of our sight on Sat- 
urday, the 12th of January, 1889, the nervous 
malady which had caused him severe suffering 
through much of his last few years terminating in 



116 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

" a clot in the heart, producing instantaneous death." x 
Surely, in the multiplied services which he rendered 
during his lifetime of sixty-seven years, few can have 
left a record so full of cheery usefulness. His two 
brief pastorates, in Brookline and in Plymouth (with 
the briefer ones at Yonkers, N, Y., and at East 
Cambridge), were filled with conscientious fidelity, 
like everything he did, but were hardly the most 
characteristic or most successful part of his work. 
The great opportunity of his life was when, early in 
the war, by that felicity of insight in Dr. Bellows 
which sometimes came like a great inspiration, " he 
was appointed Assistant Secretary [of the Sanitary 
Commission], and created and ruled the Special 
Eelief department, of which the Soldiers' Home 
[with which his name was identified through the 
years that followed] was a very small part." I was 
with him in Washington for a few days, in the 
summer of 1864, when he told me, with a detail I 
wish I could remember now, the forlorn and lamen- 
table condition of the discharged or disabled men, 
homesick, diseased, wounded, helpless, friendless, 
who were to be found by the ten thousand, thronged 
in those wide streets and desolate squares, on their 
weary pilgrimage — it might be to their home, it 
might be to their grave. 

When Mr. Knapp sought to give his life to what 
seemed the one great duty of the time, in whatever 

1 By the account of a friend, " he was standing in his parlor 
just after breakfast, talking to a boy, when suddenly he said, Oh ! 
rather as in surprise than in pain, laying his hand at the same time 
upon his heart, and dropping dead, apparently instantaneously. He 
was not, for God took him." 



FREDERICK NEWMAN KNAPP. 117 

field it should be most wanted, this form of it was 
just then and there most urgent; and his singular 
sagacity, sympathy, and genius of administration were 
put at once to their best use. It has been lately 
said that a hundred and fifty thousand of those men 
came into personal relation with him, and received 
from his shrewd, kindly, and practical intelligence 
the comfort and help which only such a friend could 
give. He knew very well the risks to health, the 
danger especially of breaking down with the insid- 
ious malaria that " walketh in darkness," and his 
precaution against it was an example of his cool 
practical sagacity. I occupied his room one night, 
while he was absent on some remoter charge : it was 
after a sultry September day ; and early in the even- 
ing his attendant had a glowing fire of coals in the 
grate almost within arm's reach of the bed. That, 
he told me, had been done every night, summer or 
winter, since he first took charge, and to it he as- 
cribed his complete freedom from any disabling 
illness. 

But his duties often carried him away, to serve in 
the crowded horrors of transport vessels or at the 
front in the edge of battle. It was a delight to hear 
him tell of what he had seen and shared on such 
occasions with his associates in the work, Helen 
Gilson and others, whose names live with us as a 
benediction ; of his kindly relations, too, with the 
colored refugees, and of the slave-woman with her 
twin daughters, " Dick and Jerry " (named, to fulfil a 
vow, after her two sons who had been sold away), 
who became his fast friends for life. Of one such 



118 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

time it is recorded that when he had been warned, 
almost ordered, not to push forward into the Wilder- 
ness with his Sanitary supply-train, — a feat which 
skirmishing parties in the woods seemed to make 
impossible, — he persisted nevertheless, and was 
three days in advance of the regular army supplies, 
just when they were most needed, after one of those 
horrible engagements, and furnished all the relief 
that was required. This is not the only example of 
that more than military courage which was found 
among the ministers of humanity in that most try- 
ing service; but it should be told as one example 
of what that service often was. In recognition of 
it, he was (I have been told) the only man who had 
never worn the uniform, admitted to the honor and 
fellowship of the " Grand Army of the Eepublic." 

A marked characteristic in Mr. Knapp was a 
happy disposition and a buoyancy of heart, which I 
cannot recall as ever once abating in an affectionate 
intercourse — first as pupil and teacher — extend- 
ing over nearly fifty years. Under the burdensome 
presence of cares, in personal disappointments, or 
when suffering from sharp illness, that peculiar 
buoyancy of spirit seems never to have failed him. 
That, with his singularly kind and sympathetic 
temper, made a strong point in the personal influence 
which he brought to bear on anything he had once 
set his heart upon. When a student in college, he 
did a thing which it was said at the time no other 
person could possibly have done, — that is, to build, 
by willing subscription of all sorts and conditions of 
men, a neat and much-needed church, without debt. 



FREDERICK NEWMAN KNAPP. 119 

in Walpole, N. H. : no other one made, as he did, 
the living link between the strong, remarkable, and 
influential family connection, to which he belonged 
by birth, and the many whom he won by the charm 
of his infinite good-humor, and his unaffected interest 
in all that made for the general good. I remember 
that it was said of him in those clays, in testimony 
of his quick intelligence, — and it is confirmed to 
me now by the best of testimony, — that he knew 
by face (as Oriental shepherds are said to do) each 
individual sheep of the two hundred that made his 
father's flock. 

In college, by his remarkable facility in mathe- 
matics, he at once took rank in a group of three in 
his own class, their chief being one of the most 
accomplished men of science in the country, Presi- 
dent Thomas Hill, with whom his relations were 
those of close affection, — for I do not think he ever 
dreamed of rivalry with anybody. It is something 
not quite explained to me, that with this brilliant 
promise and versatile intelligence he had always 
contented himself so easily in the most modest 
sphere and the quietest lines of service. After the 
strain of war-time he was content to undertake for 
a while the modest toil of raising cranberries ; while 
his chief and most durable success was perhaps as a 
teacher of boys. Not long after the war, he under- 
took the difficult enterprise of the school at Eagle- 
wood, N". J., but the military methods and traditions 
of that school were hardly congenial to him ; and, 
after a short stay in Yonkers, he " carried on his 
home school a few years at Sutton, Mass., then 



120 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

moved it to Plymouth. In fact, he was a teacher 
from the time he took Theodore Weld's Easflewood 
school at Perth Amboy till death, only combining 
with it preaching for a brief time at Yonkers and 
for a longer time at Plymouth." A hand guided by 
a gentler, braver, and more patient spirit than his 
never laid down its appointed task ; and the day of 
his burial was a day of public mourning. 

The death of President Hill, on the 21st of No- 
vember, 1891, took from us one of the most marked 
and remarkable men, if we consider the special 
qualities of his many-sided intellect, that we have 
ever known among the members of his profession. 
It is possible that his withdrawal, of late years, to 
local activities and into secluded ways, 1 may have 
made his name less familiar among our younger 
men than it eminently deserves to be. His presence, 
however, has been constantly and powerfully felt 
in the field of education : it was fitting that the 
flags were displayed at half-mast on the city schools 
of Waltham the day of his funeral ; and it is very 
much to be regretted that long before the sum- 
mons of increasing years came to him (for his age 
was still a little under seventy-four) his life was 
almost that of a recluse from the wider companion- 
ship of his own profession. As it was my joy and 

1 He had been for eighteen years minister in Portland, Me., 
having served for fourteen years in Waltham, Mass., till his ap- 
pointment as President of Antioch College, Ohio, in 1859, and 
subsequently six years (1862-68) as President of Harvard Univer- 
sity. In 1871 he accompanied Professor Agassiz on his voyage to 
the Pacific Coast. 



THOMAS HILL. 121 

privilege, many years ago, to know him in some 
relations of very elose intimacy, and as I have since 
received from him mental instruction and stimulus 
in some directions more than from any other com- 
panion or teacher, I desire to do what I may in 
these few memorial words to make him a very little 
less a stranger than I fear he is to the memory or 
the sympathies of many among us, — who certainly, 
if they had known him, would have gained much 
from the extraordinary wealth of his accurate knowl- 
edge, his clear and positive judgment, and his rare 
capacity of intellectual companionship and help. 

It is nearly sixty years since he first appeared 
in Cambridge, — a sturdy unpolished youth of 
twenty, of rustic training, dimly conscious of grow- 
ing powers, " a born Unitarian" (as he said of him- 
self), though brought up among unpropitious 
surroundings, — modestly, simply, and eagerly de- 
siring to enter the Divinity School. Wholly a 
stranger here, he went straight to seek advice of 
perhaps the only man whose name had a sound of 
welcome to him, Professor Henry Ware, Jr., who 
was not long in detecting his rare qualities of mind, 
and who urged him to begin at the beginning, and 
gain the benefit of the entire college course. 

Taking this encouragement gladly and thank- 
fully, he was fortunate in spending a little time 
with Kev. Eufus P. Stebbins, in Leominster, and 
then, by his advice, something more than a year 
as a student in Leicester Academy, where his 
faculty brightened and expanded rapidly in the 
landscape of those bold hills. Here he studied (as 



122 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

he afterwards explained to me) the lights, distances, 
and atmospheric effects, as well as the commoner 
field of wild plants and song-birds, 1 with the same 
curious precision which marked all his observation 
of nature. " His knowledge of all natural objects," 
writes the Kev. Samuel May, "was most notable 
while here, chiefly of plants, etc., wherein even then 
— an apparently raw, awkward youth — he showed 
a surprising exactness of knowledge. He seemed 
to us to knoiv everything about plants and flowers ; 
could answer every question raised at school or 
elsewhere." In college he was easily the first man, 
intellectually, in his class, which included several 
distinguished names ; in particular, he was chief in 
a group of three classmates, of rare mathematical 
talent, one of them afterwards his connection by 
marriage, Frederick Knapp, with whom his associa- 
tion through life was peculiarly close and tender. 

It was in good part by our common acquaintance 
with this dear friend that I came quite early in his 
college course to know him somewhat nearly ; and 
this led, a little later, to a season of close personal 
intimacy, which entitles me to recall some traits of 
his character not (I think) very generally known. 
I refer, in particular, to a quality likely to be hidden 
from most, not only by the natural modesty and 
self-respect of a self-respecting man, but by the 
highly characteristic intellectual self-reliance, or 

1 An anecdote told me by Dr. Hedge relates that he first at- 
tracted the interest of the man afterwards most influential in nomi- 
nating him for his post at Harvard by his singular skill in imitating 
the warble of one of our native song-birds. 



THOMAS HILL. 123 

self-assertion, which accompanied it. I mean, along 
with a vein of deep personal piety, a humility of 
spirit equally profound, an almost morbid sensitive- 
ness as to some forms of moral evil, or peril, and 
a keenness — almost agony — of self-reproach, such 
as men of his bold intellectual temperament rarely 
betray. This was, so far as one could see, purely an 
inward experience of the soul : his life, I am very 
certain, was as pure as a child's ; but his is the 
single example I recall, among the companions of 
my earlier years, of that desponding conviction of sin, 
which is at the heart of so much religious biocrra- 
phy, and gives their vein of pathos to so many 
Christian hymns. It is rarely, in these days of 
more balanced emotion, that we hear one seriously 
accuse himself of deserving the wrath of an Al- 
mighty Judge, and the agony of being cast into 
outer darkness forever, in remorse at some imagi- 
nary guilt. Yet why not that, as well as some 
men's preposterous claim of a clear title to celestial 
joys forever ? 

This may probably have been only a passing 
mood (though a genuine one) presently outgrown. 
As I think, it was a mood of that deep awe with 
which, through life, he habitually thought upon 
the Infinite and Eternal ; I might call it a reflec- 
tion of that phase of experience from the deep 
background of the awakened Conscience. And it 
seems not at all unlikely that this was part of the 
same mental habit that kept him from entering, 
in later life, into some of those radical forms of 
thought which have attracted most men of his 



124 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

mental calibre in the present generation. The topics 
which they discuss he discussed also, — freely, famil- 
iarly, copiously, — but always within what we may 
call, by comparison, the lines of the old theology. 
Paley's Horce Paulinoe, which had his absolute 
esteem in the days when I knew him best, remained 
(I think) to the last his type of the most convincing 
treatment of the Christian evidences ; and he 
adhered, not blindly but with clear critical intelli- 
gence, to Agassiz's interpretation of the law of 
organic development, in opposition to anything that 
might possibly be construed as a quasi-mechanical 
evolution, under conditions of a scientific determin- 
ism. He was, it is possible, too much a stranger 
to the habit of thought characteristic of our time ; 
at any rate, his plea against it lacks the force that 
might have been given by accepting it first pro- 
visionally, and being (so to speak) baptized into the 
spirit of it, till he should, as has been elsewhere 
expressed, have " come out on the other side." 
Thus, as if in a certain distrust of what an un- 
fettered run of speculation might lead to in a mind 
of so rare activity and self-reliance, he kept himself, 
theologically, close moored to the anchorage and 
held by the fastenings of his earliest faith. This, 
it may be, weakened his influence with a large class 
whom it was eminently to be wished that his mind 
might reach ; but doubtless he felt it to be better 
for his mental peace, while it certainly helped and 
widened his true work in the larger community 
outside. 

His logic, withal, in dealing with such matters, 



THOMAS HILL. 125 

was in some directions very bold and radical. Thus 
he was so positive in referring the operation of 
natural laws to the direct act of the Almighty that 
he would not admit that God could create an 
elastic substance, — that is, one which would react 
by its own energy : the rebound was the immediate 
push or pull of a celestial will : nay, every wavelet 
of light or heat was (so to speak) fabricated from 
instant to instant by the same voluntary act of 
God ; or, if you brought up the cases of poisons, 
contagions, or hereditary malady, he would reply 
that God had so bound himself by the laws which 
he has made that we by our own act can compel 
him to exert his power in this or that way, and in 
no other. That is, he would serenely accept this 
result of his logic, whatever one might suggest to 
the contrary. On the other hand, nothing could 
be more beautiful and instructive than the illustra- 
tions he was fond of giving, out of the wealth of his 
knowledge of natural things, — as in the arrange- 
ment of leaf-buds on the twig of a plant, or from 
the laws of celestial mechanics, — to show with 
what infinite forethought and skill the working out 
of all natural phenomena has been pre-arranged to 
solve, as we may say, the problem of the greatest 
advantage with the least expenditure of force. And 
he liked to tell how Professor Peirce, who had pub- 
lished a college text-book on " Curves, Functions, 
and Forces" altered the title to " Curves, Functions, 
and Motions" recognizing that " force " is a " theo- 
logical term " : there is no other Force but God. 
It illustrates the eager and restless mental ac- 



126 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

tivity already spoken of, that the conversation I 
most distinctly recall in which that mood of con- 
trite emotion asserted itself led directly (by what 
channel I cannot call to mind) to a discussion of 
the elementary grounds of mathematics and physics, 
which beguiled of sleep the whole of a long winter 
night, till his accurate reading of the stars startled 
us with the warning that it was near six o'clock. 
And it shows, too, the tenacity of his mental habit 
that long years after, when suddenly called to 
address a convention of teachers in Michigan, he 
took up the argument of this same discussion and 
expanded it into a scheme, or method, of general 
intellectual training (afterwards published) ; giving 
credit, also, to the circumstances under which it 
had arisen, in the meditation of the night-watches 
upon our bed, so that the assembly, in its vote of 
thanks for the lecture, included its gratitude for 
"Aunt Harriet's cup of tea," whose potency, he 
averred, had nerved us to the debate. 

While I am upon this point, I will add that his 
peculiar genius in mathematics had no more charac- 
teristic expression than in his favorite opinion — not 
only that the forms of the universe, including in 
them all types of living organism, are throughout 
the loci of mathematical formulae known to and con- 
structed by the Divine Mind, but that every formula 
which contains a mathematical truth has (presum- 
ably) its actual realization in existing fact. He has 
given a very interesting exposition of this as touch- 
ing the square root of negative quantities (the so- 
called impossible or imaginary quantities, involving 



THOMAS HILL. 127 

the mysterious factor ^/— 1), in a paper published 
in the "Christian Examiner," 1 showing how it appears 
in certain laws of reflected light. But a still more 
curious example is shown in his investigation (or, 
as he called it, " inventing ") of Curves, which I will 
illustrate by an anecdote. Calling upon him one 
day at the President's office, I found him engaged 
for some few minutes, and, to while away the time, 
he asked me to contemplate the following formula, 
p = ar, 2 and see what I could make of it, — which 
was, naturally, nothing. He then explained the 
formula, showing how, by assigning different arbi- 
trary values to a, a wonderful variety of curves 
could be developed, some of them extremely intricate 
and beautiful. He fully believed that the organic 
world was made up (so to speak) of the realizations 
of such curves, in infinite variety, from a like 
formula existing (if I may so express myself) in the 
mind of God. And he told me how Benjamin Peirce, 
that prince of mathematicians, in whom imagination 
and reverence kept pace with all the movements of 
his thought, found him once engaged in these con- 
structions, and, being fascinated by the theory, 
brought in Agassiz to see ; and Agassiz, his eye 
being caught by one of the forms, exclaimed, " Why, 
that is the very shape taken at one stage of its 
growth in the nerve-cord of a crab ! " The explorer 
was delighted with this confirmation of so dear a 

1 In March, 1858, article on "Physical and Celestial Mechanics." 

2 Here p signifies the radius of curvature at a given point, and 
r the distance of that from a given fixed point. Thus, if p = r (or 
a = 1), the curve will be a circle. 



128 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

theory. And it is possible that some of my readers, 
who remember President Hill's criticism on the 
Darwinian doctrine, given at Springfield in 1877, 
may be interested in the illustration here offered of 
his way of thinking upon these things. 

His study of nature, too, was aided by a faculty 
of observation singularly balanced and keen. He 
once had charge of a magnetic observatory tempo- 
rarily set up in the college yard, where I spent many 
a summer vacation evening with him ; and I remem- 
ber his telling me that he could in a clear sky see 
the satellites (or a satellite) of Jupiter with his 
naked eye. I have mentioned his precision of ear 
for the melody of song-birds ; and with this was 
joined a theory that every melodious phrase, or 
sequence of notes, has its precise meaning to the 
thought interchangeable with no other, — as he has 
illustrated in the Christian Examiner 1 by a very 
curious series of experiments made with the aid of a 
friend, whose musical organization was equally sen- 
sitive, but in a wholly different way. And this 
should dictate strictly, he held, the uses to which 
any musical phrase might be put. It was falsehood 
and profanation, for example, to turn a tender oper- 
atic melody, like " Batti, batti" to pious use as 
" Smyrna." " That is not a hymn tune," said his 
respondent (who was perfectly ignorant of music) : 
" it is the billing and cooing of two lovers," — which 
is, in fact, what Mozart meant it for. Under this 
theory, he composed a tune himself, which (as he 
intended it should) carried back his sister's memory 

1 September, 1855, in an article on "Church Music." 



THOMAS HILL. 129 

to some rural scene of their childhood, not by any 
association of sounds, but by the thought thus 
spelled out in the dialect of music. 

With the same precision he would turn his hand 
to almost any form of manual, even artistic skill, 
sculpture and painting included ; and a little before 
he set out with Agassiz upon their voyage to the 
Pacific, his first word of salutation, when I went to 
say good-by, was to bid me take a posture for the 
photographic apparatus he had set up for practice in 
his barn at Waltham. Still more interesting is the 
story of his " Occultator." Discussing with Professor 
Peirce the very intricate problem (to pure mathe- 
matics) of the moon's path among the stars, he had 
maintained that this could be represented by me- 
chanical apparatus accurately enough to be of service 
in the calculation of eclipses, determinations of time, 
and thereby the fixing of geographical positions. 
The professor, knowing his mechanical aptness, gave 
it him as a task to put the mechanism of it into 
shape. This lay in his mind for two or three weeks, 
without his giving much thought to it, till one 
morning, waking at four o'clock, he decided to invent 
it then and there ; and did it so effectively that a 
couple of hours later, on getting up, he whittled a 
model of his " Occultator " out of a shingle, accurately 
enough to give the time within (I think) about a 
minute. Some years after, wishing to give a young 
student the means of some vacation earnings, he 
perfected the instrument, which was used to great 
advantage in hundreds of observations made by 
direction of the "Nautical Almanac" for surveys 

9 



130 SOME YOUNGEK MEMORIES. 

in the Western Territories, which would, it was 
said, have been quite impracticable — at any rate, 
quite too costly — without this mechanical aid. 

He was, withal, keenly sensible at times of one 
mental lack, — the gift of clear, fluent, and effective 
literary expression. These things go by comparison, 
and it is not likely that the readers of his well- 
reasoned, plain, and instructive papers ever thought 
of the lack. But sometimes the indescribable quality 
we call style is the only thing needed to the wide 
and brilliant reputation which by every other quality 
one seems sure of attaining. He probably under- 
rated the merits of his own literary art, — though it 
is certain that we have rarely known a cultivated 
man in whom mere skill of expression bore so low a 
ratio to the general mass of mental power. Still, 
he was a scholar of no mean accomplishment in 
purely literary fields. Many of his brief poems 
have original melody, as well as fancy ; he delighted 
in reproduction of the ancient lyric measures in 
sufficiently melodious English ; and he was confident 
(as he told me once) that, if he chose to give his 
mind to it, he could translate the great chorus of 
the Agamemnon line for line and accent for accent, — 
in which feat he would probably have shown (as 
Lowell said of Browning) that " the study of Greek 
had taught him a language far more difficult than 
Greek." I speak of it here only as an illustration 
of the curious versatility and self-confidence which 
accompanied his great mental gifts. 

In this slight sketch, mostly made up from mem- 
ories more than forty years away, I have attempted 



THOMAS HILL. 131 

to give a hint of those qualities in which he was 
individualized, and different from any other whom 
I have equally well known. And I cannot express 
too strongly the impression that in general wealth 
of understanding, in clear, precise, and classified 
knowledge of natural facts in the greatest variety of 
fields, with power both to grasp them as a whole 
and to group them in intricate, subtile, and instruc- 
tive combinations, I have not known any that could 
be fairly called his equal : our friend Calthrop, of 
Syracuse, is the only one I can easily compare with 
him ; and in him this quality is joined with an eager 
and buoyant temper, a hearty alliance with the 
spirit of the latest science, and a faculty of brilliant 
exposition, or improvisation, which make him our 
best interpreter on many of the same lines of thought 
with those I have here dwelt upon. 

But I cannot refrain from adding here, as espe- 
cially characteristic of President Hill, the supreme 
value which he set upon pure mathematics, as the 
best groundwork of mental training, as well as the 
surest guide to the interpretation of the material 
universe. I have heard him tell how the eye of a 
pupil visibly brightened from month to month, and 
the intelligence ripened, under the fine tonic of this 
mental discipline, — an experiment the more inter- 
esting to me, since it was told me to encourage a 
parallel experiment I was just then making, which 
had a similar result. But these words are not meant 
for biography or eulogy, only to bring freshly into 
memory some traits of one of our men worthiest to 
be remembered. 



132 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

Died in Madison, Wisconsin, December the ninth, 
1889, William Francis Allen, Professor of History 
in the State University, at the age of fifty-nine. 

When a child, I do not suppose that any one 
ever thought of my brother as precocious, though 
(as it usually does) the scholar's vocation clearly 
showed itself in him as early as five or six. In 
fact, his intellectual maturity was of slow growth, 
and he was twenty-six when he took his first per- 
manent position, as classical instructor in a private 
school. His boyhood would have been described, 
though sufficiently athletic and vigorous, as grave 
and gentle rather than robust ; and he would be 
remembered as one whose candid soul repelled evil 
(to copy Goethe's phrase) as a duck's back sheds 
water, — while those inevitable touches leave with 
most of us a stain that seems, it may be, only skin- 
deep, but costs the pain of half a lifetime before 
they are quite washed out. But he certainly 
lacked neither vigor nor cheer : his interest in the 
people and affairs of his native town was healthy 
and keen ; and afterwards, in Gottingen, he de- 
lighted his companions by throwing in fair wrestle 
(which he had learned on the village green) an 
English visitor rejoicing in his strength, who had 
ventured to jeer at the lack of manly sports in our 
Yankee schools. He was, for that day, rather late 
in college, graduating at twenty-one, above medium 
rank, but not among the first. But he was not 
personally ambitious, and he had a noble and dis- 
tinguished group of classmates, among whom the 
intimacy through life has been uncommonly strong, 



WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 133 

affectionate, and tenacious. Few can have been 
more deeply indebted, or in more ways, to college 
companionship. 

A life of three years, after leaving college, as 
private tutor in a New York family of rare in- 
telligence and refinement, added a phase of experi- 
ence which in the large variety of posts he has 
since filled proved of great value to the country- 
bred youth. A natural diffidence was absorbed 
(so to speak) in that unobtruding suavity of manner 
which remained characteristic of him. In particu- 
lar, however, it was of service in giving him the 
leisure — from lack of which many of us suffer 
through our lives — for weighing with great delib- 
eration his convictions, purposes, and capacities, so 
as to lay out clearly his plan of life. His first 
choice would have been the study of theology and 
the Christian ministry ; but the theological temper 
w T as less tolerant among us then than now, liberal- 
ism was still weathering the raw air of controversy, 
and he gave up the thought, reluctantly, — partly, 
perhaps, because he doubted his aptitude for the 
hardiness of public speech, but chiefly because his 
honest thought was too " radical " to suit that 
temper which he would neither conciliate nor as- 
sail. He had, as I remember, serious thoughts of 
the law, which shaped his reading for a time ; but 
he had neither the forensic temper nor the vigor of 
eyesight (slightly impaired by illness in childhood) 
to justify in his own view his choice of that ardu- 
ous profession. And it was distinctly with the 
feeling that he accepted something less than his 



134 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

first or perhaps his second choice, that he told me 
his decision to make a vocation of classical and 
historical study, which, he modestly thought, might 
make a useful and a needed service. 

Having made this election, he spent two years as 
a student in Europe, finding there some of the 
most eminent of instructors, — among them the 
scholar historian Mommsen, — and including in 
his field of study Germany, Italy, and Greece. 
There, too, the great privilege attended him, of the 
best and nearest of mental companionship, not only 
of those who were his fellow-students here, but of 
some (as of two friends whom he visited afterward 
in Basel and in Ghent) who have placed themselves 
in the very first rank as authorities in their own 
field. In these pleasant student days there oc- 
curred, too, a curious evidence of his happy gift to 
win the confidence of all sorts and conditions of 
men ; for once, when by a break of correspond- 
ence I had failed of an appointment with him at 
Martigny, and had passed by on the other side, he 
not only was forced to leave his hotel bill unpaid, 
but, by a miracle of mutual assurance which aston- 
ishes me to this day, borrowed money of his Swiss 
landlord, and went cheerily on, to complete his 
journey. Kome and Athens were not so familiar 
ground to scholars then as now ; and the opportun- 
ity of them both, with the delightful companionship 
of his classmate Professor Goodwin, gave him an 
advantage which he always felt, in the particular 
task he had set himself, — the interpretation of 
antiquity into life. 



WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 135 

His course since has been publicly and suffi- 
ciently told: the course, mainly, of a patient and 
successful teacher for three-and-thirty years, with 
the break of two years' service with the Sanitary 
Commission during the War, and with the inci- 
dental tasks of editorship and literary criticism. 
Engaged in such tasks, he may almost be said to 
have died, like so many great scholars, pen in 
hand ; since, only a few hours before his last sleep, 
he dictated with great precision certain changes to be 
made in the final proof of a work then going through 
the press. For he had set his heart strongly, years 
before, on accomplishing two scholarly tasks, — a 
student's edition of the Annals of Tacitus, an author 
and work that especially attracted him, and a school 
History of Eome, in which he gathers very com- 
pactly, and sets forth with singular clearness, the 
results of intelligent study begun under Mommsen 
thirty-five years before, and never lost sight of since 
as his most important single task. 

For several years he had been the senior and the 
most trusted officer of his own university, and con- 
sequently most looked to for outside work. Of 
what that outside work meant to him, I venture 
to give the following hint, copied from a letter 
written a few days before his death : — 

i( I have been unusually busy this fall with two 
sets of proof-sheets in addition to my regular work, 
and my duties as church trustee, director of the Free 
Library, curator of the Historical Society, president 
of the Academy, and superintendent of the Sunday- 
school. Then, besides, I found there was nobody 



136 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

just at this juncture who could be president of the 
Benevolent Society except myself. Affairs were in 
a delicate and somewhat critical stage, the process of 
transformation from a committee of our church to a 
general charity having been practically, but not com- 
pletely, accomplished. It seemed that there was no 
one who could conduct the last stages of this process 
(or so they said) excepting me ; so I took the place 
rather than see any failure in the work. I had to 
appoint a lot of committees from all the churches, 
and got it successfully done, — every church being 
now well represented, and the society in good run- 
ning order. To add to this, I was appointed on the 
Faculty committee to investigate the hazing disturb- 
ance, and this has taken a great deal of time [some- 
times as many as three meetings in a day, and once, 
the whole of Saturday]. Fortunately, all these jobs 
are coming to an end." 

It was, indeed, on coming home from the last 
of these meetings, that he lay down utterly wearied, 
— as it proved, with symptoms of a return of pneu- 
monia, from which he partly rallied, but only to 
pass away gently, a few days later, as it were in 
sleep, without a sigh or pang. I will copy, too, 
these words received from Madison, written three 
days after his burial : — 

"I suppose without coming out here one could not 
imagine the feeling towards him, and if any expres- 
sions should seem superlative, you may be sure they 
are not the slightest exaggeration. His special re- 
finement and courtesy to every one has made a most 
deep impression among these western people. From 
the President and all the leading men down to. the 



SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 137 

poor German woman who brought her three little 
children to say she was going to take them up to the 
funeral, all seem to have idolized him." 

I give these words not merely as testimony of 
the personal traits that have left a memory widely 
beloved, but to add what was equally characteris- 
tic, — that with this suavity of manner was joined 
a judgment true as steel and hard as flint on all 
matters of political or ethical concern ; and that, 
with all his devotion to constructive religious work, 
especially in his later years, he never forgot his 
early experience, but remained just as inflexibly, 
almost resentfully, opposed to anything that seemed, 
ever so remotely, to narrow the Christian name or 
fellowship. 

Samuel Longfellow, again, is best known to the 
present generation as a leader in the front line of 
religious radicalism. He even discarded in the 
later edition of his " hymns " those tender lines 
composed by his brother for his own induction 
to the preacher's office, beginning 

" Christ to the young man said," 

because he would not, by that one name, disturb 
the simplicity of his faith in the one Source of the 
soul's higher life. And yet, for some time after he 
left the Divinity School in 1845, he still held, in 
the devoutest spirit, what would now be called 
a very conservative form of Unitarian theology. 
Among his later essays and addresses are passages 
reflecting upon phases in the political or social 



138 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

conflict of their day, strong with ethical heat and 
the eloquence of an indignant conscience ; yet, 
almost to the years of full intellectual maturity, one 
would have said that his temper was that of a 
somewhat dreamy piety, and a poetic optimism 
abhorrent of all revolutionary strife. His con- 
victions of truth and righteousness were spoken in 
a tone that lacked nothing to be sturdy and robust ; 
while his physical constitution, though no way de- 
void of a healthy vigor, seems especially to have 
craved " seasons of retreat " oftener than can com- 
monly fall to the man of a busy profession in our 
day. The mountains, the seaside, the , Azores, a 
series of long holidays in Europe or elsewhere, all 
went to the repose and ripening of his mind ; to 
say nothing of the rare privilege, as it proved, that 
less than fifteen years of settled ministry, all told, 
were unevenly divided among three congregations 
so different, yet each in its way so helpful, as those 
in Fall Kiver, in Brooklyn, and in German town. 
His " Lords of Life " seem to have known that he 
needed a widely varied and a somewhat delicate 
training. 

In respect to the quality of his religious discourse, 
we may call it a very pure and single-hearted pre- 
sentment of the " Transcendental " faith, in its more 
positive and masculine type, as it was evolved under 
the pressure of the controversies that, in their 
gravest but gentlest form, made part of his life in 
its shaping period. His expression of that faith 
is singularly free from any intrusion of a spirit 
properly critical : it is little, if at all, modified by 



SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 139 

the results of historical or economic study. He 
seems never to have felt the pressure of that scien- 
tific drift, by some called " positivist " and by some 
"agnostic," which has so powerfully moulded a 
later mood of thinking ; he seems never even to 
have been seriously tried by the logical conflict 
between his own buoyant optimism and those 
wrongs in political or social life against which his 
ethical judgment was so sternly matched. A hap- 
pier mental temperament it would be difficult to 
imagine, in carrying on the actual task it was given 
him to do, particularly in administering those offices 
of consolation and cheer which made a frequent and 
a most blessed portion of it. 

The first impression one gets from his published 
essays and discourses is, perhaps, that of a too 
predominating gravity. We miss the play of fancy 
we might have looked for, and welcome as relief the 
rare though felicitous illustration from travel or 
works of art. The tone of their plea for religious 
idealism and an exalted ethics we might almost call 
a monotone. From first to last they are (to copy 
his own phrase) an "appeal" in behalf of those 
phases in the higher life, and of the realities they 
assume in the spiritual sphere, which it was his 
particular mission to set forth. To set against this 
sustained and even elevation, we needed the very 
abundant selections given in the " Memoir " from 
his correspondence, especially that with Samuel 
Johnson, his nearest friend of forty years. Here 
we find the brighter, kindlier, and more playful 
moods of mind which we knew to be equally native 



140 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

in him. In these the tone and phrase are often 
what we might call boyish. This temper happily 
continued with him to the last, and was in happy 
keeping with what was perhaps his most unique 
and characteristic gift, — his rare sympathy with 
boys, even rude and naughty boys, which gave him 
a joy in their company, and a moral hold upon 
them such that we cannot easily recall a parallel. 
When some dear little girls asked him once why 
he was not quite so kind to them, his answer 
was, "Perhaps because I never was a little girl 
myself ! " 

The name of Edmund Burke Willson, if not so 
widely known as it deserves, brings with it associa- 
tions of a singular modesty, purity, and manliness 
that have endeared it to a wide company of friends. 

I first met Mr. Willson when we entered the 
Divinity School together in the summer of 1840 ; 
and while years have done much to color, warm, 
and deepen the first impression, they have done 
nothing, I think, to alter it. Candor, modesty, and 
clear intelligence were traits as plainly written 
then on that winning face of his, as we have read 
them there in all the years since. Some circum- 
stances brought us especially near together, — 
though not, perhaps, in the very confidential in- 
timacy that generally comes to one as a sort of 
surprise. In age we were only six days apart : he 
was by so much the elder. And our fathers were 
country ministers, somewhat widely separated in 
the same county, each having a share, not very 



EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 141 

unlike, in the liberal religious movement of their 
day. In some degree he had the advantage of a 
certain grave maturity of character ; and this was 
perhaps favored by training in a rural academy, 
which in some points may compare to advantage 
with the hothouse culture some immature natures 
undergo in college life. Again, while he was of 
seemingly vigorous health and of very companion- 
able temper, he lacked something of the physical 
hardihood and robustness common at that period 
of life. At least, I do not remember that either in 
long walks, rough fun, or athletic sports he showed 
the energy of some of his companions. If it were 
so, it may possibly have been due to some delicacy 
of organization, such as we easily associate with 
moral purity like his, though we might not suspect 
it in a young man of his ordinarily excellent health. 
An incident of this time may serve as an indication 
of what I mean. One morning he came into my 
room suffering from a swollen eyelid, caused by a 
blow or a sting, — I forget which ; and, touching it 
lightly to describe the swelling, he fainted instantly 
away. This did not appear to be due to any sudden 
or acute shock of pain ; and it seemed to reveal a 
degree of nervous susceptibility that, perhaps, made 
a part of his physical or even moral temperament. 

On the other hand, when I think of him in the 
little group of eight, which included two men of 
such very marked and diverse quality of genius as 
Charles Henry Brigham and John Weiss, it is 
most interesting to remember how, with his rare 
modesty, candor, and constitutional self-distrust, 



142 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

he always held his own steadily at all points ; so 
that there was probably not one in the class who 
so uniformly kept the moral confidence and intel- 
lectual respect of us all. As a student he was 
patient, faithful, and diligent, — especially faithful, 
I should say, in what might seem the dryer and 
more formal tasks of study, rather than enthusiastic 
or brilliant in any one line. On his feet in actual 
debate (a severe test to most men of that age) he 
was what we have always known him who have 
heard him, too infrequently, in later years, — cool, 
easy, self-possessed, never in the least confused in 
argument, clear in statement, with a quiet decision 
of speech that counts as a far greater force than 
emotional rhetoric or boisterous declamation. In 
literary taste I doubt whether refined fancy, splen- 
dor of imagination, or intellectual depth ever 
weighed as much with him as what came nearer 
home to his grave but genial and sunny temper. 
One might envy him the hours of innocent fun 
he found in " Pickwick," a new book then ; while 
some of us were victims rather to the sentimental- 
isms of " The Old Curiosity Shop." And I do not 
think that he was ever drawn (as most of us were, 
sooner or later) into the transcendental yortices of 
" Sartor Besartus." 

One would not do justice to the rare intellectual 
quality which has been recognized in Mr. Willson 
through his more than fifty years of uninterrupted 
public service, — eight in Grafton, seven in West 
Eoxbury, and thirty-six in Salem, including a brief 
episode as chaplain in the War, — without knowing 



EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 143 

something of his still rarer humility of spirit, and 
the deep self -distrust that saddened some of his more 
confidential communications. His mental tempera- 
ment was sound rather than robust, and he was not 
easily persuaded of the real strength which was his 
to put forth if he would. Devout by habit and con- 
viction, he felt more keenly than most men some of 
the changing phases of belief that we have witnessed 
during those fifty years, as they touched moments 
and moods of his personal experience. That his 
own faith remained what it was, — calm, strong, 
even radiant, — through all the changes here implied, 
lay not so much in any positive or aggressive quality 
of his thought, but rather in an unusually clear, 
firm, serene, and steadfast reliance on moral princi- 
ple, chastened (as I think) by an unusually humble 
as well as sincere and living piety. This candid 
grace of soul, which all men saw in him, was the 
root of his great and real strength. 

Willingly as he gave forth that strength in the 
accepted lines of duty, and readily as he assumed 
any responsibility which this might enjoin, it was 
hard to persuade him, sometimes, to stretch out his 
hand for a success or an influence outside that well- 
defined range, which yet might seem easily within 
his reach. To say that he lacked courage or ambi- 
tion might not be quite correct ; but there was, what 
many might fail to suspect, a hidden root of self- 
distrust. The courage he showed at an emergency 
was sheer moral courage, though carrying with it a 
fine intellectual capacity, which he was too slow to 
admit. I never knew, for example, what he was 



144 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

capable of in the way of forceful literary expression 
till I read a sermon of his on " Bad Friday," preached 
after the surrender of Burns in 1854; when I wrote 
to him at once to persuade him (as I hoped) to more 
effort in that direction, — purely in regard of the 
fine, clear, manly eloquence of style in which he had 
shown himself a master. Another instance was on 
one of the very few occasions when he stood in a 
post of special interest or dignity in his own pro- 
fession, addressing the " Berry Street Conference " in 
a discourse of " reminiscences " of rare beauty and 
instruction, — a discourse which, I think, was never 
given to the wider public. Again, the one literary 
opportunity of his life seemed to come to him when 
our classmate Charles Brigham left him, with Dr. 
A. A. Livermore, in charge of a copious mass of 
papers, the labor of a busy lifetime, with an under- 
standing that some sort of a memorial volume would 
be published. He consulted me — naturally, since 
I had just been following up Mr. Brigham's lines of 
work in Ann Arbor — as to his own share in the 
joint task, which was the biographical, sending me, 
among other papers, a very unique, curious, and 
detailed diary, in which our friend had written out 
in private hours the story of his early life, — espe- 
cially his Divinity School years, with incidents, 
confessions, and resolutions, such as to throw a very 
interesting light on his real experience. This rich 
and too abundant material seemed to overpower Mr. 
Willson's modest estimate of his own ability to cope 
with it. I vainly urged the lines on which I thought 
what was valuable in it might be preserved ; and, to 



EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 145 

my great regret, a form and scale of memorial were 
determined on — as I suppose, by judgment of the 
publishers — which shrank the proposed biography 
to a scanty and pallid outline, greatly disappointing 
to those who knew something already of its subject, 
and wholly inadequate to portray that vigorous, 
versatile, energetic, restless, busy, and somewhat 
wayward intellectual manhood. To do that well 
required not a less delicate and discriminating, but 
something of a bolder, hand. 

Further, with his great moral sincerity and cour- 
age, and his singularly clear, common-sense convic- 
tion on points of practical judgment, Mr. Willson 
was diffident of urging his own opinion against the 
opposing view of his associates. He preferred to 
accept their decision, but himself to retire from the 
field. Such, at least, was the account he gave to me 
of his partial inaction, in later years, in matters of 
denominational policy as to which he might be sup- 
posed to carry weight. Where, on the other hand, 
the question turned on points of principle rather 
than practice, there was no man whose word — clear, 
placid, firm, generous, serene — was more readily 
given, or was listened to with more uniform, affec- 
tionate, and venerating delight by his younger breth- 
ren, of whom I was always glad to count as one. 
No one who knew him but esteemed him worthy of 
the highest conventional honors of his profession, 
and probably anticipated them for him. If there is 
one thing we could regret in such a life.it is that its 
entire strength was not put forth in some more 
widely conspicuous field. But this is also its best 

10 



146 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

praise and truest victory, — that that entire strength 
was given, with perfect fidelity and without any 
stint, to the particular work he had chosen ; while 
its highest reward was found in the loving appre- 
ciation and perfect confidence of those whom he 
served in it. 

With Octavius Frothingham's death passed away 
the most brilliant and interesting figure — except- 
ing one — of those who were the younger liberal 
leaders of the last generation. His services to our 
common life of thought were so many, and his con- 
tribution to it was so rich, that it is not easy at 
first glance to fix upon a point of view for seeing 
it as a whole. Happily, he has given us the hint 
of what we seek in the title of the hymn written 
for his graduation from the Divinity School, — that 
by which most of us, it is likely, know him best : 
" The Soldiers of the Cross." This militant phrase 
strikes the key-note which seems most readily to 
bring that instrument of many strings into clear 
harmony. The invocation it addresses to the Al- 
mighty is that valiant Hebrew one, " Thou Lord of 
Hosts." The hymn itself is the very finest idealized 
conception of the holy war that summons the faith- 
ful and brave. Its imagery is of the arming, the 
vigil, and the vow of a young knight, to whom the 
crusade he embarks in is a glorious thing, for 
the joy of conflict it offers, no less than for the 
nobility of the cause it fights for. And, then, the 
proud humility of the knightly temper ! for, with 
all his militant quality, no one ever saw or listened 



OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM. 147 

to our friend without being chiefly impressed by the 
knight, not the mere soldier, that was in him, — 
the consecration of an austere vow, the sweetness 
and courtesy of a perfect gentleman. 

In his eight years at Salem, we who knew him 
at a little distance thought of him, perhaps, as one 
especially fitted for the thoughtful, refined, and 
cultivated companionship which is easiest found 
— by a stranger, at least — in little provincial capi- 
tals, where life has already grown mellow, and is 
even, it may be, slightly touched in spots with gray. 
It is probable, however, that these were not merely 
years of preparation for the wider, noisier field, 
but that just then his mind more craved solitary 
study than many companions in his thought. 
Among his clear-cut recollections of one who was 
the best of companions, John Weiss, he speaks of 
that goodly fellowship known to the initiated of 
that day as the " Hook and Ladder," — an associa- 
tion of something less than twenty, which included 
such names as Dr. Hedge, Starr King, William B. 
Greene, Charles T. Brooks, John Ware, Charles H. 
Brigham, Thomas T. Stone, Dexter Clapp, George 
W. Briggs, Nathaniel Hall, John Merrick, and (I 
think) David A. Wasson, of whom only three re- 
main. But, if I can trust my memory here, what 
he appeared to seek in it was personal acquaintance 
rather than discussion of opinion. It is as a cheery 
and bright presence I recall him, as one who seems 
in the retrospect during those years to have held 
his forces in reserve. 

It had something, accordingly, like the ring of 



148 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

a declaration of independence, or the manifesto 
of a fresh career, when we heard that the wave of 
the antislavery conflict had reached him in those 
troubled days, lifted him from his moorings in that 
quiet haven, and set him afloat upon a wider and 
lonelier voyage. In the five years that followed, 
of his residence in Jersey City, he sometimes gave 
expression to a somewhat forlorn sense of solitude, as 
if he either did not find the field of work congenial, 
or else had come to feel that no constructive and sat- 
isfying outside work was to be done in it ; so that 
it is easy to imagine that the experience was some- 
thing like an experience of exile. Still, they were 
years possibly the most needed and fruitful of all, 
to save him (if ever there were danger) from grow- 
ing into a mere man of letters or a mere platform 
orator, — years that made him, instead, a conse- 
crated scholar, a well-equipped as well as eloquent 
interpreter of advancing thought in many of its 
higher ranges. Of the evidences of this growth, 
among the first and ablest was his exposition, in 
1858, of the great critical work of Baur, which gave 
the earliest clear indication of the ground he held 
firmly, ever after, in the disputed province of his- 
torical criticism. Here, too, in a series of note- 
worthy papers, he first proved his mastery of the 
extraordinary fluency, ease, vigor, and brilliant 
touch which marked his literary handling of topics 
that in most men's hands lie quite outside the pale 
of literature. 

The large opportunity of his life and the full 
assertion of his powers came with his removal to 



OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM. 149 

New York in 1860. The story of his work here 
should be told by some one who knew face to face 
that remarkable group in which he was the chosen 
leader, and could report first-hand of a movement 
that will be better understood and more significant 
as years go by. The personal qualities he brought 
to bear in it were described by Mr. Chadwick in 
well-chosen words in the funeral address. I venture 
to add to this estimate only a few points suggested 
to me at a much greater distance ; for during those 
years I saw little of Mr. Frothingham personally, 
and heard only a single address of his in the actual 
scene of his ministration. It was such an address 
as he is well known to have been a master in, — 
clear, ready, self-possessed, carefully studied, but 
extemporaneous in delivery; forcible, but not impas- 
sioned or in the least declamatory; rather broad 
than vehement or especially vigorous in grasp ; about 
an hour in length; in substance an exposition of 
what Comte's " Eeligion of Humanity " really means, 
at once comprehensive, critical, and sympathetic. 
It seemed to imply a movement of positive or con- 
structive rather than merely critical theology, and 
in this view was perhaps a fair example of his 
ordinary address. If so, it was quite too purely 
intellectual, too destitute of appeal to feeling or even 
to imagination, to do more than hint, in the range 
of practice, the possibilities of a far-off future. It 
might even react, in some minds, toward a certain 
despondency and sense of helplessness. I wrote 
to him once, expressing somewhat warmly my ap- 
preciation of what he was doing, and of his own 



150 SOME YOUNGEK MEMOEIES. 

quality as a leader in such high paths ; and the 
first words of his reply were, " What good angel 
inspired you just then to write just that letter ? " 
implying that it had helped lift him out of a black 
pit of self-distrust and sense of failure. The " thin 
sheet of ice," he lamented to his friend Chadwick, 
was too effective a non-conductor to the rays of 
common sympathy. 

It was very likely some expression of this feeling 
that led to the report, when he left New York, that 
he confessed his effort there to have been a failure, 
even if he did not react into a conservative shrink- 
ing from it as something false and wrong. There 
is no reason whatever to suppose that his mind as 
to these matters was altered in the least. Of course 
he understood that the period he worked in was a 
" drift period in theology," — a phrase (by the way) 
sent him, as title and text, by me when editor of 
the " Christian Examiner," and wrought by him 
into one of his most characteristic essays ; and, 
naturally enough, a drift period is not just the time 
to find firm standing-ground. But it sets its own 
preparatory task, nevertheless. And that task, in 
his hands, was honestly and ably done, not needing 
(we may hope) to be repeated ; while the conviction 
that it had to be done may well have deepened the 
sense of weariness that comes in looking back on 
the patiently trodden way. It may, too, have 
deepened the grateful sense of relief and repose 
with which one reverts at sixty to tasks more quiet 
and genial, better suited to his advancing years 
than to those when he courted the stress of battle. 



OCTAVIUS BKOOKS FROTHINGHAM. 151 

To the wearied soldier the furlough was well 
earned. 

'The work of these later years speaks pleasantly 
for itself. The wonder was that the hand we 
thought tired out was still so diligent, deft, and 
swift ; that the faculty we feared was permanently 
lamed was still so prompt and adequate to whatever 
might be required. I had occasion once to suggest 
his name as biographer and editor of the unfinished 
record left by our dearly honored friend David 
Wasson, not knowing that he was (probably) the 
one living man competent to that task. Such a 
memorial as that, or as the Life of William Chan- 
ning ; such a pair of thick, genial, and readable 
volumes as those .which tell his recollections of 
Boston Unitarianism and Unitarians ; such a series 
of papers as those appearing within these years, 
giving no hint that they were years of partial 
retirement and frequent invalidism, — these might 
well make an ample record of a literary life in its 
best noontide, not in its lingering afternoon. 

A word might here be said to tell how good and 
how pleasant was the companionship of these later 
years. And this word might include mention of a 
trait which his friends have noted with perhaps as 
much admiration as any achievement of his robuster 
years, — the untiring and perfect courtesy of his 
presiding, through many an hour that must have 
been unspeakably weary, in sessions of the Free 
Religious Association, whose very title seems to 
invite what is most formless and weary of all 
modes of human speech. If any such quality ever 



152 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

did appear in those debates, I am sure that no one 
could have been more keenly sensitive of it than 
he, though that fine dissimulation let no one else 
suspect it. For his judgment of persons as well 
as of things was swift, keen, inevitable. By that 
bright rapier the dearest friend or the dearest foe 
was sure to be touched in the one vulnerable spot. 
No emotional heat ever spoiled the temper of 
his shining blade, or warped its straightforward 
thrust. 

This group of contemporary names would be 
greatly incomplete if it lacked that of David Atkins 
Wasson. The record of his life has been so fully 
given in his own words and in Mr. Frothingham's 
memoir that little needs to be added here. His 
early training, "in extreme seclusion, in a rocky 
peninsula town of the coast of Maine," was widely 
different from those yet named. We heard of him 
first as the young, ardent, poetic "pastor of an 
Evangelical Church in Groveland, Mass ; " but 
presently, in part under Theodore Parker's influ- 
ence, he became a liberal of the liberals, and was 
abruptly dismissed in 1852. He was a man of the 
strenuous quality we soon learned to honor. If I 
were to give in a single phrase our thought of him, 
it would be that, in the very finest and highest 
sense, he was our example of a Christian Stoic. 
But what this means, I must let him show in his 
own words, taken from two letters written in the 
autumn of 1876: — 



DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 153 

" Our people must have such a deal of hoping ! 
Would not a little plain and cheerful courage serve 
for a change ? Oh no, we are to hope so much that 
there shall be no place for courage. The truth is 
that the American appetite for sweets has got into 
the American mind. If one does not Offer us spirit- 
ual pastry and cake, we think ourselves shabbily 
treated. A diet of turnips would be better for a 
while, until we got back to an appetite for simpler 
things. I thank the provider who sets before me 
a liberal repast of plain dishes, neither peppered 
with sarcasm, soured with misanthropy, nor sugared 
with optimism. . . .One's words should have that 
rim of gracious not-saying. His thoughts should 
be like the words on a printed page, with a margin 
of white silence about them. There are so many 
whose speech not only has no margin, but slops 
quite over the page and spills itself into vacuity ! " 

"Your statement of the recent and existing ten- 
dencies of thought is, so far as I am qualified to judge, 
not only just as an indication of direction, but in the 
rarest degree adequate and felicitous. Of course, I 
can see what C. means in saying that it is ' not 
cheerful reading.' He is partly right. The fact 
described is not, in every aspect of it, and in every 
mood of the observer, a cheerful one. I don't per- 
ceive that you at all tried to dress it up, and make 
it look cheerful. But you cheerfully confronted it, 
and saw and said what it is. I confess that to me 
the universe, as one must now see it, seems at times 
appallingly cold, and I look back with a half -regret 
to the old fireside view of the world, so snug and 
warm, with its good Father providing for every want 



154 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

and soothing every distress, and its divine or semi- 
divine 'major-domo aiding with infinite tender care 
to make things comfortable. But this view is no 
longer possible ; and besides, I am clearly of opinion 
that it has become nearly valueless as a means of 
moral support. At any rate, I must bear testimony 
for myself that the more of such belief I spare, the 
more I find myself morally braced. Take the belief 
in personal immortality, for example. I no longer 
lean upon it, and find it wholesome not to do so. I 
do not deny it, but must plant the foot upon what 
now is, not upon what may be hereafter. Indeed, my 
experience constantly teaches me more and more the 
virtue of abstinence in such matters. I speak only 
for myself ; the case may be different with others. 
And yet, with the doctrine of immortality run into 
spiritism, who can help doubting its use in the imme- 
diate future ? It may one day be re-born and come out 
better than new. In the mean time, duty and work are 
enough ; and I find the simple diet invigorating. 

" It seems to me, then, that you have stated the fact 
as it is ; and I vote with you for the ' cold bath.' " 

Mr. Wasson had labored for some years on what 
should have been the monumental task of his life, a 
treatise or essay of political ethics, of which the 
earlier chapters were published with Mr. Frothing- 
ham's memoir. An increasing severity of judgment, 
and perhaps the lack of buoyancy of spirits, — an 
effect of his invalidism, — prevented the completion 
of this work, to the great disappointment of his 
friends. The languor, and the disposition to look 
for a more favorable season, characterizing the weary 
but delusive disease of which he died, also prevented 



DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 155 

— what they urged upon him more than once — the 
gathering of his rare but choice productions in verse 
into a single volume. The last work of his pen, 
executed with great difficulty and delay by reason 
of partial blindness, was a review of Mr. Adams's 
"Emancipation of Massachusetts ;" and, as to this, 
1 happened to know that he felt more than once 
unequal to the effort, and even begged a friend to 
take the sheets of the book and complete the task 
for him. His writings have appeared in various 
journals ; some of the best, I should suppose, in the 
" Eadical ; " but the finest of his essays I can recall, 
in thought and style, are a series in the " Christian 
Examiner," published during or near the time of the 
War. His title, " The Sword in Ethics," and a re- 
view of the career of Wendell Phillips, may perhaps 
recall to some persons these brilliant and strong 
essays. In a letter of March, 1863, he says : " If I 
write three hours a day for three days in succession, 
I am utterly prostrated. I have to read lying down, 
and must pay for every hour of work or play with 
more than an hour of extreme pain. Therefore I 
am slow." But that effort was the one great privi- 
lege, for which no cost was too dear. 

The physical affliction from which he suffered 
through most of his life has been rightly stated to 
be due to an injury to the spine in his early youth. 
But, as false tales have been circulated as to what 
occasioned it, — one of them, told in print, that it 
was the cruelty of a shipmaster under whom he 
served, — it seems fit that the correct account should 
be given. 



156 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 

I called upon him about three months before his 
death, and found that he had suffered for about a 
month from an attack which severely affected his 
lungs (as was, indeed, very evident), so that his 
family were apprehending then the rapid decline 
that followed. When I asked him of his condition, 
he said he thought it was " the old trouble," not 
knowing the judgment of the physician. I then 
said I had heard a certain " myth " as to the cause 
of that trouble, and asked him how much of it was 
true. He answered, None at all. The real cause 
was this : He was, at the age of seventeen, though 
not large in person, very vigorous and athletic, and, 
in particular, an alert and powerful wrestler. It 
chanced that, at some local gatheriu gin the political 
campaign of 1840, he was challenged to " try a fall " 
by a powerful young fellow, over six feet tall, of a 
quarrelsome clan ; and, knowing the folly of it, at 
first refused. Under great pressure, he at length 
consented, on condition of having the usual advan- 
tage yielded to the smaller man, — putting both 
arms below those of his antagonist, — which was, 
however, denied. Then, for more than an hour, he 
submitted manfully to the taunts of the crowd, till 
it was offered that the two should stand as cham- 
pions of their respective parties, when, in an evil 
moment, his better resolution gave way. Two falls 
out of three would give the victory. His opponent 
at first, as he expected, tried by leaping on him to 
crush him by sheer weight ; but he " knew a trick 
worth two of that," and brought him in an instant 
to the ground. Then they grappled ; and, clasping 



DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 157 

his hands behind Wasson's back, the other tried 
to bend him double. It was a desperate struggle. 
But, by a violent effort, our young David foiled his 
big antagonist, and threw him a second time to the 
ground, — as he believed at the time, at the cost of 
his own life ; and, indeed, for a fortnight after he 
could not so much as turn himself in bed. 

The life-long consequences of this terrible wrench, 
and its effect, in particular, in crippling that bril- 
liant and vigorous career, seem to justify the telling 
of this story in detail. The suffering and illness, 
however, did not prevent many a sturdy display of 
force in the exacting labors of public oratory, any 
more than the patient and resolute tasks he set him- 
self as writer and thinker. Indeed, no very serious 
alteration in health was manifest till within some 
six years, or thereabout, when his increasing blind- 
ness brought its special symptoms of infirmity. An 
operation for cataract, in the spring of 1881, was 
very successful in restoring the vision of one eye, 
which was, however, imperfect, having been hurt by 
the stroke of a cow's born in boyhood, so that it 
seemed expedient to repeat the operation on the 
other eye. This, most unfortunately, resulted in 
the destruction of the organ and a summer's sickness 
with much suffering, and a permanent lowering of 
his general health. It was under these infirmities 
— with the alleviation of friends, books, and the 
skilful culture of his little vineyard — that the last 
victories of his life were won. He died on the 
twenty-first of January, 1887. 



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By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

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HEBREW MEN AND TIMES 

FROM THE 

patriate^ to tf)e jWesstaf)* 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
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New Edition, with an Introduction on the results of recent Old 
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Topics, i. The Patriarchs; 2. Moses; 3. The Judges; 
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A. D. 50-1880. 

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useful guide to more extended study of Christian history. The topics 
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